Envisioning Howard Finster: The Religion and Art of a Stranger from Another World 9780520961074

Table of contents :
Contents
Note on Internet Citations and Additional Web Resources
Preface: Stories about Stories
Introduction. Once upon a Time: Encountering the Word Made Flesh
Chapter 1. On the Finster Trail: The Business of Howard Finster’s Divine Busyness
Chapter 2. Signs of the Times: Howard Finster and Prophetic Reenchantment
Chapter 3. The Matter of My Mission: Howard Finster’s Religious Template
Chapter 4. The First and Second Noah: Howard Finster’s Ark of Myth and Meaning
Chapter 5. The Finster Mythos: Just the Facts in Howard Finster’s Mythic Life
Chapter 6. Snakes in the Garden: Life and Death in Paradise
Chapter 7. The Strange Beauty of Bad and Nasty Art: Toward a Finsterian Aesthetic
Conclusion. Howard Finster: The Hidden Man of the Heart
Notes
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
Credits and Permissions

Citation preview

Envisioning Howard Finster

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Envisioning Howard Finster The Religion and Art of a Stranger from Another World

Norman Girardot

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Girardot, N. J., author. Envisioning Howard Finster : the religion and art of a stranger from another world / Norman Girardot. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-520-26109-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-26110-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-96107-4 (ebook) 1. Finster, Howard, 1916–2001—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Finster, Howard, 1916–2001— Religion. 3. Outsider art—United States. 4. Art and religion—United States. 5. Folk artists—United States. I. Title. n6537.f464g57 2015 709.2—dc23 2014049376 Manufactured in the United States of America 24 10

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper). Front cover image: Yours to Color, by Matthew Mazurkiewicz, using Howard Finster’s lithograph Road to Eturnety (#4963, 1985). Finster’s original work depicts the people’s path of salvation, which runs from an earth torn between the Cold War beasts of the apocalypse up to the celestial heavens crowded with many flying saucers and UFOs carrying prophetic messages from God. Lehigh University Art Galleries Collection. Photograph by Steven Lichak. © Finster Estate. Back cover image: Detail from Howard Finster’s Brain Cell Warehouse (#1440, c. 1979). Girardot/LaBelle Collection. Photograph by Steven Lichak. © Finster Estate.

For all who love a strange story, but most especially for Diane, my sons (David, Jacob, Christopher, Gregory), and my grandchildren (William, Daniel, Andrea)

And they went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. —Mark 16:20

I am Howard Finster a Stranger from Another World. My father and mother, my sisters and brothers, my wife, my childre[n,] my grandchildren have realy never figured me out for my kingdom is not of this world only my fathe[r] in heaven knows me on this planet and thats why I have been strong and happy, When my work is finished I will go back to other worlds. —Howard Finster, I am Howard Finster a Stranger from Another World, c. 1977–1978

The man who never in his mind and thoughts travel’d to heaven is no artist. —William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790–1793

Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. . . . The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in: and another world to live in—whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or not—is what we mean by having a religion. —George Santayana, Reason in Religion, 1905–1906

There are important connections between religion and art: both are oriented toward meaning, and both deal in universal human values—both are fundamental to being human. What is more, religion and art share remarkably similar discourses. Each works primarily through story, image, symbol and performance. —Barbara DeConcini, “The Crisis of Meaning in Religion and Art,” 1991

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Contents

Note on Internet Citations and Additional Web Resources Preface: Stories about Stories

xi xiii

Introduction. Once upon a Time Encountering the Word Made Flesh

1

1. On the Finster Trail The Business of Howard Finster’s Divine Busyness

28

2. Signs of the Times Howard Finster and Prophetic Reenchantment

56

3. The Matter of My Mission Howard Finster’s Religious Template

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4. The First and Second Noah Howard Finster’s Ark of Myth and Meaning

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5. The Finster Mythos Just the Facts in Howard Finster’s Mythic Life

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6. Snakes in the Garden Life and Death in Paradise

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7. The Strange Beauty of Bad and Nasty Art Toward a Finsterian Aesthetic

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Conclusion. Howard Finster The Hidden Man of the Heart

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Notes Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Credits and Permissions Plates appear after page 188.

219 255 259 261

Note on Internet Citations and Additional Web Resources

The web addresses cited in the notes were active sites as of July 2014. Many additional video images of Howard Finster’s artworks and activities—including a commentary on his life, a sampling of his diverse output, some masterworks, pictures of his Paradise Garden environment, his cloud portfolio, and details of some of his activities at Lehigh University—can be found on YouTube. Links for these videos are available at the University of California Press webpage for this book, at www. ucpress.edu/go/envisioninghowardfinster. Following are the titles of the individual short videos posted on YouTube: (1) Exploring Howard Finster’s Brain, Part 1 (15 minutes; www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1K2vqiSDQo) (2) Exploring Howard Finster’s Brain, Part 2 (18 minutes; www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6ISVDBOqvE) (3) Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden (5 minutes; www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9DC-84eyV0) (4) Revealing Howard Finster’s Masterworks (8 minutes; www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN4hKsIAiRs) (5) Howard Finster Prints and Cloud Portfolio (5 minutes; www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGKm60BM3eI)

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Steven Lichak, director of the Digital Media Studio at Lehigh University, edited and assembled these videos (© Lehigh University Art Galleries /LUAG and Museum Operations).

Preface Stories about Stories

Where there is no vision, the people perish. —Proverbs 29:18

We live in the stories we tell ourselves. —Grant Morrison

Do what you will this world’s a fiction, And is made up of contradiction. —William Blake

I’d prefer to remain a mystery, I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it up different every time. —Andy Warhol

Howard [Finster] will tell his many stories to anyone within earshot who has five minutes or five hours. . . . As in the oral tradition of good storytelling, these stories have changed and evolved over years of countless retelling. —John F. Turner

envisioning story In the beginning was the human experience of the natural world (vision). Sky and earth. High and low. Spirit and matter. As above, so below. There was the story (myth) and the performance (ritual). Passionately and proficiently putting these words and actions together (art) using sound, light, xiii

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and matter creates other sensual and symbolic worlds of meaning. Human worlds, different cultures, and many miniature worlds within worlds were born. The imaginary became real. And it was the prophetic mission and prescient message of the visionary storytellers to make this creation and re-creation happen—over and over again. So goes the never-ending story that I track in this work about one of these extraordinary visionary travelers, religious storytellers, and artistic world-builders. I refer to an extraterrestrial evangelical preacher-prophet-artist from northwest Georgia, Howard Finster, who lived from 1915 or 1916 to 2001. I begin this book by focusing on the myth and meaning of Howard Finster’s religion and art—that is, his many and sundry visions and religious convictions, multiple stories, and myriad artistic productions. While we all have some basic, though frequently trivialized, idea about stories, we are more perplexed by things like visions, folk or visionary art, and especially myths—terms that carry multiple ironic meanings. Moreover if some form of religion or religiosity is added to the mix, the puzzlement becomes even greater. These matters need not be overly mysterious. After all, vision, art, myth, ritual, and religion (at least in terms of what those English words currently suggest directly and more often obliquely) are profoundly common phenomena within every human culture and era. Each of these experiential and cultural phenomena is fundamentally mundane, and, at the same time, each deals with our experience of what nostalgically goes beyond the ordinary awareness of the world as a single and seamless reality. Indeed, these otherworldly phenomena as experiences and cultural productions play a crucial role in the creation, re-creation or transformation, and recreation or refreshment of the everyday (quotidian, temporal, and profane) world we live in. For the time being, as a working principle in my story, vision (in the sense of visionary experience) may be understood as nothing more or less than the special otherworldly sights and uncanny feelings we experience in our nocturnal dreams, waking reveries, moments of nostalgic recollection, trances and exhilarations, near-death encounters, imaginative flights, spacey epiphanies, alien abduction memories, twilight hallucinations, out-of-body phenomena, surrealistic automatisms, or other greater and lesser states of altered consciousness either naturally or artificially engendered. The issue is not the variability of human consciousness but rather the question of what exactly is normal, or everyday, consciousness. In other words, we are all to some degree visionaries in relation to the other worlds experienced throughout the course of a day

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and throughout a lifetime. All of us share such visionary experiences— although certain seers and heavenly travelers (called by many different names and exhibiting different traits depending on the culture and epoch: shamans, tricksters, prophets, fools, wizards, bards, mystics, magicians, surrealists, spiritualists, psychotherapists, artists of all types, entrepreneurs, and so on) are extraordinary in terms of the ecstatic vividness, intense memorability, creative power, and obsessive applicability of their otherworldly sights.1 Of course, these visionaries are not all the same; but many seers of this extreme variety have a compelling need to live within their visions and share them with others. In this way, visionary artists revive, reshape, and recycle the ordinary world by giving themselves and all of us access to other, more vibrant alternative realms from the past, present, and future. From inner and outer space too. They give new life to what in time is worn out and depleted— “washed by rain, dried by the sun” as Howard Finster would say. These exceptional voyagers to other worlds, who regularly see themselves as only temporary visitors to this world, service our ever present need to experience the life-affirming and curiously refreshing sights of other worlds. To be born again. These otherworldly explorers are often exceedingly, sometimes crazily, strange and yet oddly familiar. Myths/ stories and ritual/performance are the human arts, the special symbolic skills, used by these voyagers to understand themselves and to make their visions communal and effective. Myths are those big and powerful stories of visionary experience that help us make sense of the transitions and transformations of cosmic, social, and individual life. Myth, whether overtly present in a traditional cultural context or in a more subterranean way in the modern world, is the imaginatively storied and dramatic art that gives us insight into the hidden patterns of existence, the entangled reality of both the seen and unseen dimensions of human life. Myths are, then, the aesthetic templates for our individual and collective existence on what Finster would call “this earth planet.” Ritual performance, again either directly or more covertly, is the creative theatrical art of making the visionary stories real for the performer as well as shared and operative for others. These practices are all signs—that is, stories, performances, and artworks that give meaning and direction, a message and mission, to the storyteller’s life and to our own sojourn on this planet. These are the multiple arts of storytelling that make us human.2 And these are typically the different cultural arts that are called religion, whether this is an organized social entity or a more amorphous spiritual feeling or generic religious attitude.

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But I have said enough for now about these commonplace yet exceptional matters. The rest of this work is my evolving vision and story about Howard Finster’s visionary stories—about how his life as the Stranger from Another World is deeply rooted in his self-taught, and gloriously scrubby, personal and religious art of mythic assemblage and dramatic performance. Finster really did (to borrow from the Grant Morrison quote in the epigraph) “live in the stories” that he told about himself and made real for others in his art. Throughout my endeavor to tell these stories, I have tried to apply the ancient Chinese Daoist principle of unlearning with respect to many of the professional writing habits I developed in my long career as an academic. The Daoist sage seeks to learn to unlearn specialized expertise in favor of returning to a more intuitive and natural way of knowing and communicating. It’s the craft, carpentry, and performative nature of writing and thinking that produces meaning and beauty. It’s the story! Not theoretical proficiency—although that has its place. And Daoist mystics, like Paleolithic shamans and Howard Finster, were notoriously simpleminded when it came to such overly analytical matters. Interpretation and understanding in this sense are not matters of abstraction; rather they have to do with the degree to which the story told has some resonance with the larger stories of human existence on the earth at any particular point in time and space. Most of all, the questions to be asked should be: is the story that is told and performed interesting (or even amazing!), and does it call forth an intellectual and emotional response? Does it help us see some aspect of the myriad other worlds that make up the universe of human experience? As the Chinese storyteller Zhuangzi and the British Monty Pythons affirmed, if there are amusing moments in the unfolding of the stories, so much the better. By far the most important thing I learned in the writing of this book is the lesson that constantly must be relearned. I mean the mysterious truth about the art of writing itself, how meaning emerges only in the active and obsessive process of writing and (especially) rewriting, and how a good story almost always ends up writing itself. It’s not that writing is ever easy. It never is. But in the often painful alchemical crucible of imagining worlds of words on a blank computer screen, something in the midst of that stumbling labor can come unexpectedly from some outerspace world. And it comes by itself on prancing cheetah paws, sometimes quickly and sometimes more hesitantly. So to tell Finster’s story of religion and art in all its improbable fullness, I had to learn to be brave enough to tell my own story without relying too much on my professorial habits. And I had to be open to the quickening movement of images and

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ideas coming from other worlds. I have not always been successful in this effort requiring both courage and humble responsiveness. However, I must say, my effort has been a transformative and interactive process that has produced something resembling a tale of my own pilgrim’s progress.

self-made worlds I end these prefatory remarks with a small story by a master storyteller and novelist, Michael Chabon, who recently wrote an interpretive essay about another storyteller and cinematic artist, Wes Anderson. Anderson’s work—those marvelous enigmatic films of words and moving pictures, such as Moonrise Kingdom, The Life Aquatic, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Grand Budapest Hotel—provoked Chabon into a narrative riff, or the telling of a kind of miniature mythic story, that captures much of what I have been trying to say in this preface. Chabon’s narrative also alludes to much of what this book attempts to say (“when leaning in” as Chabon says) about the signs and stories of the Baptistartist-trickster-showman Howard Finster. Chabon tells us (and I’ve made Finster-like bracketed insertions in this universal story), Some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle [of a world], start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again. . . . [But] the most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half-remembered [a paradise garden before the fall]. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models[, these other symbolic worlds,] “works of art.”3

the trick of it The conclusion to this tiny tale involves the basic “grammar” of most mythic stories—that is, the attempt by the chief character, protagonist, hero, warrior, trickster, shaman, prophet, puzzle master, magician, or artist to resolve the predicament of this fragmented world.4 It depends on the ability to see healing alternatives in visions of bygone and future worlds. This involves the skillful artistic trick of imaginatively putting

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things back together again, symbolically and significantly. With signs following as the Bible says. But as popular folklore would have it, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” couldn’t really “put HumptyDumpty together again.” In other words, the condition of fragmentation is ever present. It’s what the Bible and Finster would call the condition of life after the Fall. Our need to imaginatively reassemble the shards and fill in the gaps is the creative compulsion of art. And scholarship too. This drive is never complete, but infinitely repeatable. And this propensity is at the very core of the religious impulse as well. It involves the artist’s passionate need to recycle the broken and thrown-away remains of this world, as well as the fragments of the artist’s own psyche, in the visionary spirit of many forgotten, dimly remembered, and unseen other worlds. Artistic creativity and religious ecstasy are one until they, too, are fragmented. A “million pieces all in one,” as one of Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden signs proclaimed. Moreover, as with the bittersweet legacy of Finster’s visionary art, there are almost always the awkward conjoined emotions of nostalgic pain and hopeful joy.5 The conclusion to Chabon’s small story about stories, religion, art, and big and little self-made worlds in a box (an idea illustrated by Howard Finster’s Visions of Heavens West Wing, plate 1) goes like this (with my interpretive additions in brackets): “For my next trick,” says Joseph Cornell, or Vladimir Nabokov, or Wes Anderson, [Claus Oldenburg, Alexander Calder, or Howard Finster,] “I have put the world into a box [ark, mouse museum, miniature circus, amusement park, garden, church, a framed three-dimensional Plexiglas container].” And when he opens the box, you see something dark and glittering, an orderly mess of shards, refuse, [animals two by two, bicycle parts, all the inventions of humankind,] bits of junk and feather and butterfly wing, [a mason jar with a boy’s tonsils, broken bits of mirror, a saint’s desiccated pizzle,] tokens and totems of memory, [biblical] maps of exile, documentation of loss[, and signs and pictures of the end-time].

And then “you say, leaning in, ‘the world!’ ”6 This small box is, to be sure, only another symbolic world, but it is, or can be, a potent sign of what once was and still might be. So for all of us within this big broken world, the trick of it truly is about paying attention to the portentous signs, the religion and art, and “leaning in.” Leaning in, that is, to see the world temporarily born again through the boxed visions and maverick environments of certain remarkable storytellers and artists.

introduction

Once upon a Time Encountering the Word Made Flesh

As for me, I’m just passin’ through this planet. —Howard Finster

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. —John 1:14

From the beginning until now / God spoke through his prophets. . . . And their witness was this: That the Word should be made Flesh. Yet their witness could only be received / as long as it was vaguely misunderstood, as long as it seemed either to be neither impossible nor necessary, or necessary but not impossible, or impossible but not necessary; and the prophecy could not therefore be fulfilled. —W. H. Auden

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. —George Orwell

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remembering the first time This is what I remember about my very first encounter with Howard Finster. Intensely curious but not at all knowing what I would find in north Georgia, I flew into Atlanta during the summer of 1985. It was (with apologies to Edward Bulwer-Lytton) a dark, humid, and stormy day that seemed to portend something both preordained and perplexing. Appropriately enough, I was flying from the biblically christened town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to meet, as I was subsequently to discover, the self-styled Second Noah of the end-time. God’s Last Red Light. I was accompanied by my colleague, friend, and collaborative comrade Ricardo Viera—then as now the creatively energetic head of the art galleries at Lehigh University. Finster had just started to receive national attention but had not yet reached the heights of fame he would soon achieve. Certainly at this time there was little recognition or appreciation of Finster within academic institutions. All we knew was that, according to my brother Joe, who lived in Atlanta, there was something extraordinary going on in the hills of north Georgia. Moreover, both Ricardo and I had some dim sense that it was our self-appointed mission to go to the source of these mysteries. However, beyond wanting to meet the man who had been called a kind of backwoods William Blake or Southern Andy Warhol and to tour his artistic environment, we had no particular plan or agenda.1 We were truly interlopers in a strange land going to meet the self-proclaimed Stranger from Another World. Yes, there was a lot of strangeness. From the little that we had heard, it seemed that Finster, mostly in those days called a contemporary folk artist, had something to do with a kind of unusually provocative and spontaneously generated untrained art—hence my art colleague’s willingness to participate in this bizarre and open-ended pilgrimage. It also appeared to both of us that there was a particularly compelling and surprising religious dimension to this art that went beyond its overt evangelical trappings. Furthermore, my serious lawyer-brother, Joe, had convinced me—his older sibling, who was at times an impractical religion studies professor—that I really should check out what this art-making Baptist preacher was doing in an obscure corner of Georgia. This was, I freely admit, a real stretch for me, since at that time I knew very little about art history, much less contemporary folk or outsider art. Although trained as a comparative religions scholar, I had spent my career up to that point studying and writing about Chinese religion, especially the ancient mystical tradition

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called Daoism (or Taoism as it was confusingly romanized in those days). In the best sense of the academic commitment to specialization, I had not really done very much actual comparing—especially regarding such dramatically disparate things as Daoist mystics and American Baptist preacher-painters. The year before this unusual journey in Georgia, I had published my first major book, Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism, which was a long academic treatise on the mythic foundations and religious meaning of early Daoist texts dating back to the sixth to the fourth century b.c.e.2 As I know now, this work about an ancient Chinese aesthetic approach to life already incongruously forecast my ruminations on the meaning of Finster in this book. Even more peculiar was that my early Daoist book, which was inspired by the rich cosmic symbolism of Chinese bottle gourds (or calabashes) and Daoism, actually anticipated what was to come by way of similar gourds in Georgia. Finster would, no doubt, say that the Holy Ghost was at work in revealing a confluence of gourds in China and Georgia. But whatever the source of this congruence, I took it as a symbol of what was forthcoming—a potent sign of some mythic conjunction connecting different phases of my life’s journey. After visiting my brother and my parents in Atlanta, Ricardo and I ended up getting a late start in our rented car for the trip north. The drive up Interstate 75 and then through Rome to Summerville and Pennville took only a few hours, but after getting lost several times and asking for directions in those pre-GPS days, we did not arrive at Finster’s compound until it was getting dark. The rain, however, had let up and the moon was becoming more and more visible. Finster at this time was more or less sleeplessly working in a small frame house set within several acres of swampy ground that made up his rambling found-object and embedded-concrete environment called Paradise Garden. This house, with a wildly decorated front porch and an extension toward the rear, served as his studio, showroom, mailroom, warehouse, and plywood-cutout-prep room. Within the Garden compound, the house sat next to a rickety outdoor trampoline and the much more imposing and recently completed World’s Folk Art Church—a one-room church building with Finster’s visionary additions, including most dramatically an eccentrically converted turret topped with a round cupola and spire. Lights glowed from within the house, indicating that something interesting was going on inside. At first sight from the car, the scene was much more akin to a weird yard-art version of a small, rather dilapidated one-floor shack than an artist’s studio cottage. The porch was

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cluttered with Bible-verse signs, a swing, a huge painted image of George Washington, all kinds of plywood-cutout artworks, a dilapidated metal rocker, and various tidbits of found-object decoration. Although I was not aware of its significance at that time, the porch also displayed a large wooden placard boldly painted with what would become Finster’s most famous homespun message about his passion to reassemble the broken pieces of the world: “Washed by rain [and] dried by sun . . . a million pieces all in one.”3 Most striking was that one side of the house had recently been painted with gigantic, brightly colored biblical figures that Finster (identifying himself with the prophet Jonah) called the repentant “People of Nineva.”4 Ricardo and I quickly realized that this was not Finster’s original home or the place where he reportedly had his transformative vision that led him to paint sacred art but rather another of the several small houses in the expanded Paradise Garden compound that Finster, as the demand for his work grew, had made into his special workplace and studio.5 It was the place where, in the “beauty spot” of Paradise Garden, as Finster told Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1983, he worked all night doing his paintings, leaving the daylight hours for working in Paradise Garden. As we were to discover, this gnarly sixtynine-year-old man accomplished these prodigious labors by dint of an almost superhuman energy, sporadic cat naps, periodic dollops of peanut butter, slugs of Coca-Cola, wads of chewing tobacco, and (as legend would have it) the consumption of large amounts of cheap instant coffee spooned into his mouth straight from the jar.6 As we slowly circled the house and Garden in our car, trying as much as possible to avoid the drainage ditches lining the narrow roadways, we were struck both by the obvious poverty of the neighboring houses and by the incongruity of Finster’s environment, which even in the growing darkness was visibly dominated by the looming World’s Folk Art Church and all manner of junk-encrusted concrete mounds and large assemblages. Several other potent memories quickly come to mind. One is that, as we drove around the Garden, we witnessed the haunting vision of a neighbor child with a mental disability howling in the moonlight in the backyard of what Finster called the “peanut-butter-sandwich house” right across from the studio. Another—and no less evocative—recollection for me was the sudden recognition as we walked up to the door of Finster’s lighted studio that many of the trees, buildings, and yard constructions were decorated with hundreds of dangling gourds—largely martin gourds (pendant-shaped gourds with a cutout hole for martin

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birds) but also calabash and snake gourds like the Chinese Daoist gourds I had so fervently written about. A sign! A portent: something weird and wonderful this way comes!

wonders to behold Suddenly the door to the studio was opened by a smiling teenage boy, Finster’s grandson Chuck. We were beckoned into a surreal sanctum. And then we saw Finster, who was in the middle of the room, hunched over a battered easel beside a teetering mound of multicolored paint drippings. Grinning broadly at us, he continued to daub brightly colored “tractor enamel” (as he called it) on cutout angels, which he then smeared with his finger, making multiple smiley-face feathers on the plywood wings.7 I don’t remember that he got up to greet us at this point, but he did cheerfully welcome us and shouted out, “Where you boys from?” Learning that we were professors from up North—from Lehigh University, which for many years Finster seemed to confuse with General Lee High School—he turned and smiled beatifically at his two interlopers. While he continued to paint, and while Chuck and a young friend were watching the Playboy Channel on a TV set in the corner, he abruptly launched into a prolonged, loud, and insistent sermon on apocalyptic damnation and the Holy Ghost’s “seven invisible members” (figure 1). This was a biblically laced harangue energetically acted out with folksy stories about religion and politics, family anecdotes, and hammy dramatic gestures. All of this was in turn punctuated by mimicked birdcalls and other animal noises and by miniature theatrical tableaus of his first born-again experience and his childhood vision of his dead sister, Abbie Rose.8 We were simultaneously amused, bemused, amazed, dumbfounded, overwhelmed, and perplexed. All our highly trained academic organs of interpretation were shutting down. This bewilderment—especially after several hours interlaced nonstop with some pretty esoteric end-time prophecy—was compounded by our uncertainty about whether we should continue to pay nodding attention to the unruly sermonic rant or simply smilingly ignore it as we tried to examine some of the artwork haphazardly nailed on the walls and ceiling and piled up throughout the house. Much of this was work created and donated by Finster’s growing legion of fans, but because it was haphazardly displayed in this crazy sanctuary the overall effect was both oppressive and compelling. Finster himself didn’t seem to care if we listened or simply wandered about the

figure 1. Howard Finster, The Seven Invisible Members of Mankind, c. 1979. Print on paper, 15 x 11.5 inches. Artwork no. 1440. From Folk Image (Tappahannock, VA: American Folk Art Co., n. d.). Girardot/LaBelle Collection. Photograph by Steven Lichak. © Finster Estate.

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room. His real focus was on his painting, and more than anything else he was completely and warmly accepting of us as exotic, most likely infidel, visitors from up North. You felt that you somehow had become a long-lost friend of the family. Despite periodic refrains about the imminent end-time and other stock evangelical sentiments (especially persistent allusions to an ever present Holy Ghost), there was never any personal rancor or angry denunciation. The whole improbable and meandering sermon was couched more in humorous acceptance than in any kind of contentious rebuke. Already it dawned on us that Finster’s self-revealed version of a Stranger-from-Another-World evangelicalism—his own special brand of what I eventually came to call his Christian shamanism, or perhaps more accurately his shamanistic Christianity—had somehow transformed some of the narrow absolutism of the typical Southern Baptist preacher.9 Something surprising was going on here. And it had to do with maverick forms of religion and art. Of particular interest were Finster’s unexpected and compelling distortions of biblical imagery and the Southern evangelical religious message. The flagrantly mixed-up biblical, outer-space, and loopy popular culture references in his words and images were outlandish enough, but when these were put in context with the makeshift flamboyance of his Paradise Garden and the slightly lopsided World’s Folk Art Church looming over the studio, the trampoline out back, and the gourds and signs everywhere, we knew that we had really entered an alternative universe. As Flannery O’Connor said in her haunting revision of the New Testament refrain in John 8:32: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”10

the foundational myth At some point, and not very much in relation to anything else he was saying, Finster launched into what had already become the central creation myth for his increasing fame as a contemporary folk, visionary, and soon-to-be outsider artist. I refer to the oft-told story of the apparition of a humanlike face on his finger (perhaps that of God or some other spiritual entity) in white tractor enamel while he was fixing to paint a repaired bicycle for some of the poor children in his neighborhood.11 This pivotal event reputedly took place in January 1976, a number of years after he had retired as a pastor in local Baptist churches. Although we did not fully appreciate it at the time, this had already become a well-rehearsed aspect of Finster’s tried and true performance

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figure 2. Finster’s reenactment of his finger-face vision, c. early 1980s. John F. Turner Collection. Photograph © John F. Turner.

for city slickers and professor types, a miniature theatrical event ritually acted out as a kind of endlessly repeated “restored behavior,” complete with a freshly drawn face on an outstretched and paint-smeared index finger (see figure 2). All of this dramatically culminated with Finster’s capitulation to the finger face’s insistent command to “paint sacred art.”12 The first painting at this telling was said to be the face of George Washington copied from a dollar bill and hastily painted on the side of a shed. While there are several versions of this story that highlight its inevitable mythic slipping and sliding, this revelatory event was truly central in Finster’s constantly evolving personal narrative. This tale became the pivotal episode, or mytheme, in the increasingly embellished Finster narrative linking his self-styled biblical identity as the Second Noah and the Second Adam with the legendary history of George Washington and the pop cultural present of celebrity saviors like Elvis, Henry Ford, and Hank Williams. By suggesting that this finger-vision performance was already a regular aspect of Finster’s own self-promotion as well as of his promulgation of God’s urgent messages to humankind, I do not mean to suggest that it does not convey an important truth about Finster himself, the reality

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of some significant transformative religious event in his life, and his subsequent vocation as an authentic visionary figure and incredibly prolific visual artist. Such effectively reenacted and affectively re-presented (as preached, painted, and performed) stories also convey some significant truth about the human condition. This is because good theater— and all good art, like good marketing and productive myth- and ritualmaking—is always and simultaneously a dramatically presented collage of historical and imagined reality. Memory is, after all, intrinsically mythic in nature—that is, a creatively and nostalgically put-backtogether assemblage, or recycling, of past events and half-remembered debris. Moreover, the telling, showing, or acting out of such memories for others inevitably gives even more myth and ritual leverage to such remembered and reenvisioned events. Finster recited and enacted different versions and extensions of this story, but all were built on the generally consistent narrative armature of (a) a magical face (not necessarily God’s face but simply a “human” face or an angel face) manifest in the fleshy nub of Finster’s index (or other) finger, (b) the telling of Finster to paint sacred art, and his initial resistance to the command because he had never painted before (certainly he had), and (c) finally the hurried production of the “first painting” from the George Washington image on a dollar bill (there are actually several different works that were said to be this fabled first painting).13 Even the time of this pivotal event tended to wander (usually identified as January 1976, but not always), and other details were quite flexible, particularly the closely related visions involving a ten- or fifteen-foot giant man (associated with the inspiration for the Garden) or visitations by a spectral Elvis. Finster was acutely aware of what constituted a hit among his fans, and throughout the 1980s the finger story generally took on a consistent format even if the ritual performance could go off in different directions depending on his particular audience and whether his banjo was handy for some musical embellishment.

preaching as performance art Another historical, mythic, and emotional truth suggested by these creation stories repeatedly reenacted and made real again for others is that Finster was in training for his ultimate artistic vocation from the very beginning of his born-again experience in his teens.14 This led in turn to his many years of itinerant preaching in northern Alabama and Georgia. In the Evangelical Protestant Bible Belt of the American South, preaching

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is the quintessential mode of religious expression and draws its power and effectiveness from its broad multimedia appeal and intense performative character. The tradition of evangelical revivals and oracular preaching in the United States (particularly the South among both white and black folk) has been interpreted as a kind of shamanistic, “embodied,” or “ecstatic performance” involving “appropriations of biblical cosmology.”15 As the famed Calvinist theologian Karl Barth noted, preaching is truly a “Protestant sacrament” equivalent in its aesthetically theatrical and ritualistic forms to the Roman Catholic mass.16 Contrary, therefore, to the oft-stated claim that Finster gave up spoken preaching for the visual arts of painting, the truth is that, as Finster himself acknowledged, his painting was simply a more image-based, colorful, and effective form of preaching.17 He was only admitting that preaching, especially in the South, was never simply a verbal art of spoken words. More than anything else it was predominantly a director’s, actor’s, and stage designer’s art appealing to the complete panoply of human senses. It is a ritual exercise, or a patterned bodily and participatory art form, of repetitiously rhythmic sounds (whether words, sounds, song, or music) and suggestive visual effects (signs, images, costumed movement, and gesture within a staged setting of three-dimensional props and two-dimensional pictures) drawing upon real and imaginary sources. Finster did not suddenly become a painter in 1976 with the fingerface vision.18 Rather he had always inhabited an acutely aural and visual culture of King James Bible phraseology, Bible pictures, diagrams, chalk talks, and apocalyptic charts.19 Finster during his formative years, from the 1930s through the 1960s, was also influenced by all manner of roadside signs (of both the “Jesus saves” religious type and the “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco,” “Burma-Shave,” and “Drink Coca-Cola” commercial type), roadside crosses, tent revivals, Baptist camp meetings, traveling carnivals, sideshows, itinerate preachers and salesmen, religious yard art, and flea markets (see figure 3). Important also were various wayside tourist attractions—for example, the early Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum in Florida, which he visited during family vacations; and, perhaps most significant from the 1930s on, Rock City, a cutely garish example of fake gnomes and natural rock formations on Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee, not far from where Finster lived. All of these were designed to sell sinners on God’s amazing grace and to provoke showy wonderment, exciting thrills, puzzled bafflement,

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figure 3. Finster as itinerant preacher on his car-chapel, c. 1940s. © Finster Estate.

and unexpected exhilaration.20 Finster was, from an early age, an exceptionally dynamic old-time preacher adept in the ritual stagecraft of the revival tent and the baptismal pool, as well as an inveterate salesman of the gospel and his own self-made burnt-wood crafts and artifacts. His newfound destiny as God’s painter of “sacred art” only added another multimedia dimension to his already formidable skills. Decades before Finster became known as a folk artist, he had created two roadside-attraction-style environments: his first garden and exhibit house, in Trion, Georgia, in the 1940s and 1950s; and the Pine Springs Museum in Pennville in the 1960s, which later became known as the Plant Farm Museum and, ultimately, as Paradise Garden.21 These were created to assuage his burning entrepreneurial ambition to be simultaneously a preacher and a showman and to make the wonders of the world (often in miniature-scale tiered structures) attractive and amazing for his children and all others. If in the course of these activities, he was able to sell something on behalf of God and his own family, then that was all the better. Visiting attractions or environments like Rock City and Paradise Garden was like venturing into a revival tent. Each represented a kind of alternative and highly theatrical world that allowed for a temporary retreat from the sinfulness and impoverished drudgery of everyday

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life. Furthermore, in the case of visiting a revival tent, or Paradise Garden, or Finster’s studio back in the 1980s, there was also the radical possibility of a more dramatic and permanent change in one’s life. Encountering Finster’s Paradise Garden for the first time was like entering a crazily makeshift similitude of the original biblical Garden of Eden complete with lush foliage, farm animals, multiple Trees of Good and Evil, metal hills made out of broken bicycles, many painted signs and fun-house mirrors, and multiple concrete mounds embedded with shards of crockery and glass, as well as displays of what he called “all the inventions of humankind.” One experienced both the frisson of disorientation and a tiny feeling of curious exhilaration reminiscent of the first time that one, as a child, went to a carnival sideshow or odd roadside attraction. To this day, I can conjure up images from a boyhood family vacation when we visited a place called the Mystery House, which supposedly defied gravity, in the shining mica-flecked Black Hills of South Dakota. Equally vivid are visions of a two-headed chicken in formaldehyde in a decrepit tent at a carnival in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. These sights in the 1950s were more evocative than anything I experienced in the Saint Jude’s Roman Catholic parish church my family attended in Wauwatosa or in the middle-class splendor of the Milwaukee art museum. In fact, my paradise garden or palace of mythic wonder in those days was a movie theater in downtown Milwaukee that showed many of the space invasion and monstrous-mutant films of the period.

in the sideshow of life Ever the preacher-showman, showoff, and sideshow barker, Finster had learned—as earlier generations of Baptist preachers had learned through their use of biblical illustrations and apocalyptic charts accompanied by hollers, strutting gyrations, hymns, and a laying on of hands—that gaudy cartoonlike banners placed on the tent of revelation would bring the sinners and slackers in. As it had said on an advertisement for one iteration of the Finster Tent Revival, “Bible pictures will be shown each evening.”22 Most of all, he intuitively knew that revelatory enticement required an art with an emotional intensity that elicited reverie and amazement from onlookers. This in turn depended on his theatrical command of dramatic storytelling and image making, on an instinctual feel for props and costumes, and on both a musician’s and a magician’s skill at using emotion and misdirection.

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Finster embodied the wounded wisdom of the Southern Appalachian Protestant tradition, where preaching was never simply a matter of spoken words about salvation. His method artistically conjured a new creation or, more accurately, a re-creation of what Christians called the better prelapsarian world of paradise.23 One was progressively absorbed into a new born-again identity and, at a profound level, a felt personal relationship with Jesus. Prayer in this newfound intimate context took on the character of an actual conversation with the savior. Christ was often heard by those filled with the spirit, and on occasion there was a visible manifestation as well. This was very much the case with many of Finster’s visions, in that (as he recounted them) they involved actual spoken conversations with some kind of angelic or divine being.24 Finster’s success depended on the degree to which the divine Word in the Bible and in his visions became embodied, as well as on ritually employed language, image, and gesture within a staged setting or environment. This was an art that created something unexpected and different so that we might more readily see the damnable spiritual apathy and indifference of the ordinary world. It is, then, religion as art (not merely religion using art) that has a stage magician’s power to translate dream and vision into words, images, and bodily action that, in turn, create alternative time-out-of-time worlds that can be entered into and temporarily inhabited. These are worlds that, once entered into, can potentially shock us out of the stupor produced by the mundane world and open us to a more creatively eccentric, enduring, and full life. The fundamental problem in these matters of spiritual and aesthetic vision within the disenchanted everyday world was, according to the Southern Evangelical Finster and the Catholic Southern gothic writer Flannery O’Connor, the failure to see and feel the incarnational presence of God in every aspect of the created world, especially in what was forlorn and despised. This sacramental conviction demanded a total art form that was colorfully dramatic, rudely incarnational, and at times disturbingly grotesque. Entering into Finster’s artistic tent of revival was to enter into a sideshow where we might finally recognize our own freakish inability to embrace the saving wonders of the world and flesh. We need to enter into the sideshow of life if we are to see ourselves as we really are. And to accept our own freakishness is not to affirm anything necessarily monstrous. Etymologically, freak is, in Old English, primarily a positive word that refers variously to a bold or heroic man, to dancing and whimsy, and to an unusual and obsessive person. More broadly, it means to be open to, and amazed by, the serendipitous

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rainbow-wonder of the world. In evangelical terms, it refers to accepting our damnable condition while, at the same time, recognizing the reality of other, more glorious possibilities. It takes a freak to know a freak. And for many in his own community and religious tradition, it was Finster who was the disruptive, trashcollecting oddball. The assembled mounds of junk in Paradise Garden were bad enough, but equally disturbing for many was the man himself. As the townsfolk would say, he was just too ridiculously talkative and self-promoting, and he had an extended family that was sometimes in financial or legal trouble. Equally disturbing was that he seemed to be pitching a weird Christianity that equated Jesus and Elvis, heaven, and planets in outer space. Furthermore, the man never slowed down but always seemed to be manically energetic and frantically working on one improbable project after another. As Finster himself would say, he didn’t like to waste time getting God’s words and images out to the world. This was a land of snake handlers, glossolalia, strychnine drinking, and other spectacularly unusual Pentecostal and holiness practices, but Finster trumped traditional evangelical strangeness by boldly proclaiming his career as an extraterrestrial visitor, a prophet, and the Second Noah, who had a divine mission. This was an outrageous claim that for many of his neighbors seemed to shamelessly broadcast the deep blasphemy of his own self-styled divinity. Invoking damnation and the Second Coming, described in the book of Revelation, and indirectly alluding to Saint John’s “Word made flesh,” Finster seemed to say that it was his sacred destiny to “dwell among us” full of signs about “grace and truth” (John 1:14). Moreover, Finster’s words were constantly made tangible, especially because they were inscribed in enamel on his myriad painted images. The biblical Word incorporated in images and in Finster’s many scrawled words was the most powerful sign of all. So, for many within Finster’s immediate world in the Appalachian foothills of northwest Georgia, he was someone to be shunned and mocked—even at times shot at. Of course by the late 1980s, when Finster had achieved an incredible national celebrity and had started to make a considerable amount of money, the locals started to give him more respect despite their inability to make sense out of what was going on. It was enough to leave him alone to please the city folk from Atlanta and up north and to have these visitors from other godless worlds contribute to the regional economy. From Finster’s perspective, however, things were actually moving along quite nicely according to God’s plan.

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later that night At this point in our inaugural encounter with Finster and his alternative universe, Ricardo and I were experiencing an extreme bout of emotional and cognitive overload. We were glad, therefore, to realize that Finster’s seemingly unending performance had died down somewhat. During that lull in the evening, we knew that we had already been brought into his tent of revival. Both exhausted and exhilarated, I was also thinking that whatever charisma meant, this must be it. Moreover, these mixed emotions we had about Finster’s dramatically expressed “Holy Ghost feelings” plainly involved a getting from, and a giving to, Finster. Finster was treating us to an unusually moving spectacle beyond any expectations or experience we had had. But at the same time, our reaction to this marvelous performance was surely the result of all sorts of stereotypical moods and motivations related to the American South, fundamentalist Christianity, and provincial evangelical preachers. The truth was that my colleague and I were mesmerized by the visceral oddness of this manic painter-preacher, by the vaguely Southern gothic location in northwest Georgia, by the cluttered and ramshackle studio set within the sprawling self-made art environment called Paradise Garden, and by the amazingly prolific and cartoonish art of biblical damnation and angel-cheetah joy. But most of all, we were overwhelmed by Finster’s rousing, impromptu performance for a couple of unexpected outsiders—two inquisitive but largely innocent university professors from the benighted North. Much later that night, Finster went on to play his country banjo and discuss the messages from the Bible and outer space recorded on the fastidiously numbered paintings he was working on that night. At the same time, he was taking random phone calls from collectors around the country. And then, in the late night– early morning hours, we were all interrupted by the sudden arrival of a taciturn Michael Stipe of the increasingly famous Athens, Georgia, alternative rock band R.E.M.25 Stipe and the band’s lawyer greeted Finster, studiously ignored Ricardo and me, and proceeded to disappear into the night. Over in one corner of the room was a pile of cassette audiotapes of Finster’s sermons mass-produced on a bunch of inexpensive portable tape recorders. Always clued into the latest methods for getting his message out, he called these his “chain tapes,” which contained, in addition to his sermons, all sorts of songs, animal noises, shouts, stories, corny jokes, and mock dialogues, as well as reenactments of his first born-

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again experience, complete with multiple, self-produced sound effects. Each was a veritable radio show, some kind of crazy-quilt variety hour. The effect was almost an evangelical-style “Louisiana hayride” variety hour like the early 1950s radio performances that made Elvis Presley famous. As always for Finster, the point of his art and his growing celebrity was to get the message out by every means possible, a message that was often conventionally apocalyptic, but which was, at the same time, evolving in an increasingly unconventional way. At one point I asked about the painting Finster was working on, one of a smudge-face series of cutout-style, trumpet-bearing angels, and he went into an extended discourse on his painting methods. These were techniques he had first picked up while fixing and painting old bicycles. He was pleased to tell us that his methods of using a brush and “blendin’ and rubbin’ the tractor enamel” were rapidly evolving. He also made it clear that he was constantly experimenting with different visual art forms, and so for the past few years he had been working on many different kinds of materials (wood, metal, paper, mirrors, cloth, stone, glass, and Plexiglas) and found objects while making both two- and three-dimensional works. At the same time, he was trying out many different ways of working with these materials—drawing, painting, pounding, gouging, etching, burning, gluing, assembling, collaging, melting, and so on. Finster’s fantastic curiosity and inventiveness were always overwhelming. Especially popular as affordable artworks for his fans were his small, cutout plywood statues (in those days selling for around thirty-five dollars; the larger ones and the medium-sized plywood paintings of angels or Coke bottles sold for around eighty dollars), which most often involved a painted cutout tacked to a wood base and covered with some kind of handwritten biblical message and Finsterian observation. By this time, he had learned that part of the charm and attraction of these shelf-art pieces was his penchant for scrawling some additional personal message on the back complete with a signature and date. A few years later these works would become increasingly routinized, as Finster began using Sharpie paint pens to draw the images and pasting photocopied sayings on the bases. During this rendition of his self-taught artistic methods as they applied to these small shelf sculptures and to his two-dimensional paintings on plywood boards, it was evident that Finster had a natural talent for line, composition, graphic design, and color, along with a raw passion to try out every conceivable makeshift way to use his materials and

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techniques. His creative inventiveness and entrepreneurial craftiness were simply astounding. He also proudly told us about his paper, cardboard, and plywood patterns that he used as templates to mass-produce certain favorite images. As we came to find out, his children and grandchildren, especially Allen Wilson, did the primary preparation of the cutout blanks and were trained to put a base coat of paint on each, after which Finster completed the paintings. Allen had also mastered his grandfather’s method of making special wooden frames, which he diecut and decoratively burned. In a flourish of pride in his artistic accomplishments and growing fame, Finster ended this discussion of his artistic methods by suddenly grabbing a hammer lying by the side of his easel. To our chagrin and astonishment, he then started hitting several nearby plywood cutout paintings, explaining that he always made them “industrial strength.” As he put it, there’s no need to worry about breaking a piece of Finster art, since he made things that would “last to the end of days.”

selling the performance Like the virtuosic Baptist preacher and itinerate salesman Finster had been earlier in life, he was both telling us about his methods and selling us on himself and his art. He dearly wanted us to buy something that night. Money was unquestionably a factor, but his pitch was simultaneously a crass commercial, a primitive aesthetic manifesto, and a soaring spiritual transaction. This minimally educated man from rural Georgia, who boasted that the Bible was the only book he had ever read from beginning to end, had bamboozled the clueless professors. Entranced and yet trying to cling to our professorial identities, we meekly capitulated to Finster’s incredible native intelligence and creative energy. We did not yet really know what was going on, but this outrageously improbable evening certainly sold us on the power of his enthralling personality and boisterous art. A kind of secular conversion had taken place, which, during the next quarter century, would lead to multiple Finster exhibitions and residencies at Lehigh University, a memorable lecture in which Finster would make and then discourse on chalk-smudge faces on the blackboard, several catalogs, conference presentations, my frequent visits with him and his family back in Georgia, and numerous interviews and articles.26 As noted by John F. Turner in his pioneering 1989 book, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, it was at Lehigh University during Finster’s 1986

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exhibition and family residency (or “workout” as Finster liked to call such things) that he produced the first “computer folk art” on an early Amiga computer. Always adept at creative wordplay and humorous mistakes, he inscribed the first printout of his digital drawing as having been done at “Lee High” and as sponsored by his friends Norman and Lecordo (forever misconstruing the orthography of Ricardo’s name; at other times he spelled it Leacordo). Although I did not realize it at the time, our first meeting in Georgia at Finster’s exceedingly bizarre multimedia theater of biblical prophecy and extraterrestrial revelation would change my life and career. For better or worse, Finster’s performance that night, and my ongoing relationship with him and his family, led to my reaffirmation of the validity of a comparativist approach to scholarship (in the face of academic disciplinary specialization, particularism, area studies, and professional careerism), a conviction in the ritual and theatrical meaning of “professing” in and out of the classroom, and (to the dismay of some of my academic colleagues) a radical shift toward studying the special relationship between ecstasy and creativity, strangeness and salvation, outsider art and unconventional forms of religion. A prophetic sign of these broader transformations in my career as a teacher and scholar came about after Lehigh’s first major Finster exhibition and family residency at Lehigh, in the fall of 1986. This was the first show anywhere that included art by Howard Finster along with some derivative and at times surprisingly original work by his daughter Beverly and his grandsons Chuck, Andy, Michael, and Allen. Driving up to Pennsylvania from Georgia in an old van, Finster and his grandsons spent a week living on the Lehigh campus, where they interacted with students, faculty, and community people in a series of events, among which was a mass “paint-a-thon” on the university quad and Finster’s improbable production of the world’s first computer folk art. The impact of the Finster offspring and Finster’s rough art, indomitable charisma, infectious good humor, and intrinsic friendliness upon the generally conservative Lehigh campus and surrounding community was striking in all sorts of positive, and often incongruous, ways. Indeed, Finster’s ability to engage and inspire others with his personality and art was a central aspect of his overall religious message. As Finster had said about his recently completed World’s Folk Art Church and his Paradise Garden, these were meant to be places where everyone, even obtuse professors and anyone else, was invited to contribute selfmade art (in whatever form that might take) to the Garden, to the Folk

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Art Church, and later to the “rolling chair” gallery, or what I often called the zigzag gallery.27 In other words, the real message of Finster’s sacred art was not so much the routine admonition to get right with the Lord by conventional acts of evangelical piety. Rather it had more to do with faith and works in a fully material or sacramental sense. For Finster the message was especially the need to discover the inner artist in all men and women, or what he also called the “hidden man of the heart.” Before it was Christian or even religious in any ordinary or conventional sense, faith in Finster the man and in the saving grace of what he had artistically wrought in north Georgia was primarily an affirmation of the need to embrace one’s own creative spirit and distinctive strangeness. Left moot by Finster was whether sincerely having faith in Finster’s remarkable charisma and creative energy would inevitably and necessarily lead to some kind of final Christian conversion. In fact, as pointed out by John F. Turner and others, actual conversions of people to Christianity were really never Finster’s strong point.28 More important was the basic need to simply get the message out that something amazing was taking place in a little town in northwest Georgia. What would result from that awareness depended on an individual’s own interpretation of that message. For me at least, the Christian possibility was not really the issue. Nor was that possibility necessarily a problem. My concern, after all, was with penultimate, proximate, ongoing, and temporary transformations, not any kind of absolute termination. What was at stake was my own sense of gratitude for what Finster had accomplished in my mind and heart regarding the intertwined significance of religion and the art of being creatively human. And, of course, what he showed me about our need for a constant revival of our bodies and spirits. In this way, I have always felt that the lesson I learned from Finster was as much universal as it was Christian. Finster was actually providing me with an answer to the old post-Darwinian, nineteenth-century clerical disparagement about the then emergent discipline of comparative religions. The problem at that time, and often today, was that such a scholarly, commonsense, and nonjudgmental approach to the multitude of religious traditions could only end up meaning that one was “comparatively religious.” One of them obviously had to be better than any of the others and, as most Christians would declare, knowing religions by the fruit of their accomplishments obviously affirmed the higher truth of Christianity—especially Protestant Christianity. In other words, one might end up like too many university professors, who, when it comes to their own religious convictions, seem all too often to be meaninglessly wishy-

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washy and generic or, perhaps worse, atheistically or agnostically nonreligious. Given nineteenth-century Christian triumphalism and intolerant exclusivity (something that continues today in many conservative evangelical circles), such an outcome seemed impossible when it came to comparing Christianity, especially the elevated glories of Protestant Christianity, with the nineteenth century’s ragtag batch of “primitive” religions, assorted “world religions,” irksome Roman Catholics, and later outsiderish hybrid and cult movements. The result of these ruminations was that I felt compelled to return to Georgia in the summer of 1987. I did so with my family in tow in order to give thanks, and to give back something tangible, to Finster for the gifts he had given to me and my university. I arranged, therefore, for my wife and children to stay with my parents in Atlanta while I went off for a week (I hoped no longer) to Pennville to convince Finster to let me live in the garden and build some kind of embedded concrete sculpture as a token of my gratitude. With the prompting of Finster’s wife, Pauline, and the need to avoid an ever-growing number of visitors, Finster was spending less time in the old studio. Finding me resolute in my desire to construct something substantial out of concrete in the Garden, he smiled with a sly suggestion that this northern professor would probably not last too long trying to work in the stifling heat of the Georgia sun. Despite this cautioning note, he offered to let me stay in the studio house and use whatever materials I wanted. He also gave me a few lessons in his techniques for working with cement, building a wooden armature, and most important, embedding materials in cement. A final crucial instruction that I will never forget was his solemn directive that I must leave small holes at the base of the structure—some for water drainage but several also for the snakes and other small critters to enter so they could nest inside the sculpture. I will not go into detail about my labors that week. Nor will I recount several adventures with Allen and Andy involving some lurid Southern gothic aspects of Chattooga county folklore, although I do want to acknowledge one memorable trip into the mountains to visit the ruins of a brick castle said to be the lair of a northern Satanist (and reportedly a professor) who had been murdered several years earlier in some kind of orgiastic and fiery debacle.29 It was beastly hot that week, and getting used to sleeping on the stained mattress in the studio was daunting. But the Holy Ghost was alive and well, and I was able to build a large, moundlike concrete sculpture just down the Garden path from the World’s Folk Art Church. With the help of the grandsons and other

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interested townsfolk, friends, and family, I embellished the structure with all kinds of found trinkets, made-up concrete placards, and Lehigh memorabilia brought from home. On several occasions Finster himself came by to observe my progress, and toward the end of the week, when it was clear that I was actually going to finish something unusual and truly permanent for the Garden, he was obviously pleased. Even better was that, as he put it, it would inspire others to come and build something lasting in the Garden. He thought that by so doing they would share in his attempt to get all the people on this planet to know about his art and his messages from God. And just like his fans who donated works to the Folk Art Church, those who built something in the Garden would learn about their own secret talents as artists. It was this quasi-initiatory event in Finster’s Garden—the building of what I ended up calling the Lehigh Memorial Sculpture—that gave me the courage to explore more of a myth-ritual approach to teaching and scholarship. At the same time, it led to my increasing involvement in the burgeoning world of outsider art via the fledgling American Folk Art Society and, later, to my work with the legendary bottle-cap artist Mr. Imagination (Gregory Warmack, 1948–2012) and the creation of the Outsider Enclave Art Park at Lehigh.30 Over the years, Finster’s prediction about others adding works to the Garden proved to be true, and eventually he constructed the rolling-chair gallery down the middle of the Garden, in which he housed works that could no longer be put in the sagging Folk Art Church. Most memorably for me, however, when I visited Finster in the 1990s he proudly told me that my sculpture had the distinction of inspiring “the Chief” (or Chief Haring as he called the famous New York graffiti artist Keith Haring). When Haring had toured the Garden, he had asked about the moldy and worse-for-wear sculpture with signs on it referring to Lehigh University. Haring was originally from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and knew about nearby Lehigh University. Finster’s explanation of the sculpture’s origin led to Haring’s resolve to build his own sculpture for the Garden. Sadly this was only months before Haring died in 1990 from AIDS complications, but his sculpture was constructed by the Haring Foundation and installed in the Garden just thirty feet or so from the Lehigh Memorial.

performing for johnny The most memorable and mythic conjunction of Finster’s charisma and performance art was his appearance on August 5, 1983, on the Johnny

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Carson show, broadcast from Burbank, California. Given the archetypal nature of that event—a wonderfully humorous and poignant encounter between the canny Southern codger-preacher-artist Finster and the quintessential middlebrow comedian/magician/talk show host/entertainer Carson—it is worth noting that the episode was really not spontaneously inspired and naively folksy as it at first appears to be.31 Ever the knowing and funny, flip but generous, TV talk show star, Carson at times played the role of the amused but befuddled straight man who had just confronted someone from another planet—a somewhat laughable alien creature from the rural South. Decked out in his churchgoing blue suit, tie, and vest, Finster quickly took over the show while incessantly talking, smiling, strutting, and grimacing. At one point, he even playfully poked the jovial sidekick Ed McMahon like a long-lost friend. Superficially this encounter between Finster and Carson was quaintly friendly, and the audience ended up cheering and clapping along with Finster’s increasingly energetic and roving performance on stage. Finster, however, was no country simpleton, and he surely knew that this appearance on the Johnny Carson show was a breakthrough moment for him. There had already been glimmers of national fame, but nothing matched the star-making power of NBC’s Carson show. As Finster had so memorably said, he was his “own T.V.,” but his broadcast range was limited. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get the message out to the entire country. In this sense, it is interesting that the overtly religious and apocalyptic aspects of the message were noticeably downplayed. The closest Finster came to something theological or philosophical was when Carson asked him how and why he decided to build Paradise Garden. Finster quickly answered (leaving out any reference to Holy Ghost feelings) that it was a little like how we all know exactly where and how to scratch an itch.32 We spontaneously and intuitively know when and how. The real message here was about the old charismatic showman himself. Finster clearly understood the advantage of pressing his performance in the direction of his winning personality and off-the-wall charm. As he said in explaining why he had worn a suit and tie to the show, the Johnny Carson show was really a “pretty big place.” As was typical with such shows, there was a broadly agreed-upon script for Finster’s appearance, and it centered on Finster having a banjo (provided by the show) and singing a couple of his whimsical and appealing self-written songs. The first of these was, as he put it, a song for “young people” since it had to do with his impressions of all the

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young girls he was meeting in California. Admitting that he hadn’t learned to pick the tune yet on a banjo, Finster suddenly bounded from his chair and started to sing while walking back and forth across the stage. What started out as a cute ditty about “all the pretty girls” reclining on his thumb ended up with a bizarre refrain indicating that he had come from outer space. Striding across the stage with a twinkle in his eye, he ended this song by saying that if he lost his mind, he’d “get a super brain.” Both the studio audience and Carson were smitten at this point. Ever the responsive showman, Finster then quickly proceeded to pick up his banjo and loudly sang what had become one of his signature homespun songs, “I’m Just a Little Tack in the Shingle of Your Roof.” By this time the whole studio was shouting and clapping along with the song, and to anyone who had ever observed a Southern revival service, it was obvious that Finster had moved into a full-blown evangelical preacher’s strut complete with his own hymnal accompaniment. Saying as he left the show that it was “healthy to laugh at least once a week,” the old preachershowman from north Georgia had unquestionably won over Carson, the studio of tourists and city slickers, and the nationwide TV audience. He had also established himself as a rising star within the emerging field of what was starting to be called self-taught and outsider art. This Carson performance shows how adept Finster had become at “using the media for his purposes,” notes John F. Turner. Finster “equated fame and success with the amount of media space he inhabited. Numerous times he mentioned that he wished he had the fame of Elvis Presley, so he could use that kind of platform to spread the word of God (everybody needs publicity, even Jesus Christ).” Equally important was that “he was a great media (print or TV) investment because he was a true eccentric (which newspeople like for personality pieces) and he wasn’t camera or quote shy. Howard also had his entertaining stories memorized and needed no prompting to draw them out.” These skills, which he quickly perfected in the years of his growing notoriety, “made the newsperson’s job quite easy, because he usually gave more than enough salient quotes to fill a minute-and-a-half TV piece or twenty inches [of column space] for a feature piece. Also, at the same location, the journalists had the opportunity to record an abundance of interesting visuals to support the quotes.”33 Turner goes on to say that Finster almost always controlled the interview—whether it was by a local newspaper, NPR, or Johnny Carson.

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And when interviewers “realized that they had lost control, they usually just sat there and let Howard be Howard, and seldom challenged anything he said—which allowed Howard to reinforce many of the myths he had told previously, from the giant at the gate to Abby on the staircase and Elvis stopping by the garden.” As the news-savvy Turner notes, “The majority of the media interviewers let Howard write, for them, the story they were assigned to write. All they needed was a paragraph of background/context, and then they plugged in a handful of entertaining/ outrageous quotes and that was it—a fun story that was shaped and handed to them by Howard.”34 Myth makes history.35

high on howard The enthusiastic reception of Finster by Johnny Carson’s studio audience also suggests a larger truth about Finster’s effect on all sorts of people, not only professors, media interviewers, TV audiences, and evangelical Christians. This kind of raw fascination helps explain why large numbers of sophisticated urban fans, educated middle-class folks, assorted hipsters, and numerous infidels and sinners were so strongly attracted to Finster. It is clear that Finster’s magnetism as a storytelling artist was complexly made up of assorted aesthetic, religious, sociological, psychological, and personal factors. For example, it has been said that much of the aesthetic pleasure—feelings of amazement and wonderment—was largely an emotional reaction to the primal power and celebrity of Finster’s dramatically eccentric persona and performance. These were feelings seemingly rooted in a nostalgic quasi-religious quest for the primitive authenticity missing from the banality of middle-class urban life and religion. It is not uncommon for people who have been intrigued by Finster’s work to recount (as I have done here) their own discovery narrative and personal connection with the art and the artist.36 Moreover, for a fervent collector who owned some of the artwork, or some material manifestation of Finster’s charisma, these objects were tantamount to owning a talismanic relic of another, more intense kind of reality. Just as some got high smoking pot in suburbia, it was possible to get mildly high on Finster, especially during a close encounter of the personal kind. But after one leaves Paradise, and the snakes of existence have done their damnably inevitable work, what then is left? What about the art without the person, without the story? The real issue is, of course, that the art can never be separated from the stories—those of the artist, the fans, the art worlds, the critics, and of course, the infidels

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and cultured despisers. Mine included. But we must take seriously what happens to our feelings and our assessment of the work when we come back down and reenter the everyday world. How do we evaluate such a bizarre and unwieldy corpus of work that all too often depends on stories of personal encounters with a preacher-artist who lived in darkest Georgia? And now that Finster has gone back to other worlds, where does that leave us? How will we respond to the art without the validation of his living presence? The question about the Finster phenomenon and its legacy becomes, then: how can a general mythic longing for paradise; or the longing for the real, the authentic, or the “primitive”— or the desire to reexperience Finster’s unique charisma—be maintained without Finster himself?

the finster phenomenon There are many other stories to be told about the highs and lows of spirit, performance, and artistic production throughout Finster’s life, but my first “once upon a time” encounter is the touchstone for my overall understanding of the larger meaning of the Finster phenomenon. In this book I more fully lay out Finster’s own cobbled-together myth and ritual structure of that phenomenon. Here I want only to emphasize that my faith in the special power and meaning of Finster and his art— especially during the white heat of his artistic creativity from the 1970s to the early 1990s—was grounded in the totality of his artistic-religious performance. The fascinating truth about Finster was how he combined word, image, and action in a way that produced the formidable allure of nostalgic remembrance, visionary wonder, mythic resonance, and ritual intensity. In addition to many hundreds of articles, essays, and news accounts, there are already a number of books about Howard Finster. The most important of these works appeared at the height of Finster mania, toward the end of the 1980s. I refer to the important 1989 works by John F. Turner and Tom Patterson, which are both semi-interpretive but are mostly “as told to” and constitute overlapping autobiographical renditions of Finster’s well-rehearsed but delightfully down-home, serious, and funny story of his life as the Man of Visions and Stranger from Another World.37 Both are rich repositories of photos, images of artworks, numerous documents, and assorted artifacts; and both are also significant early attempts to present Finster to a larger public and— especially in the case of Turner’s book—to offer suggestive commentary

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on the overall Finster phantasmagoria. Robert Peacock’s Paradise Garden (1996) is also notable for its extraordinary photography and poetically sparse text. Finally there is the book by Finster’s daughter Thelma Finster Bradshaw, published right before Finster’s death in 2001. It is particularly valuable as a touching personal memoir of Finster’s early years and is replete with many rare family photographs.38 Unfortunately amid a glut of coffee-table picture books and other outsider ephemera, there are few serious reflections about Finster or the whole Finsterian phenomenon. My book is neither another picture book nor a straightforward biography of Finster. It is, however, written in the storytelling spirit of the aforementioned works by Patterson and Turner and includes my own extended interpretive consideration of the man, his religion and art, and his larger legacy. It is most important to recognize that Finster, in his visionary and artistic expansion of the Southern Evangelical practice of preaching, moved in the direction of an increasingly aesthetic and unconventional affirmation of God’s divinity as revealed in diverse natural and human signs. There were his biblical tales but also all manner of other Holy Ghost signals, such as the hidden faces in the clouds and in chalkboard smudges at Lehigh University. And as he gleefully announced to Johnny Carson, spontaneously knowing where to scratch an itch can also be taken as a sign of spirit. Then there were the myriad Finster artworks and signs in Paradise Garden with biblical stories and sayings; images of popular and historical celebrities like George Washington, Elvis, and Hank Williams; angels and cheetahs; assemblages of Coke bottles, bicycle parts, and gourds; banjo songs about getting a “super brain”; and quirky visionary “coloring books” from outer space. The mythic and performative aspect of Finster’s visionary art was a key factor broadening and ameliorating some of the sharp edges of his intolerant, apocalyptically tinctured words and painted biblical cartoons. To enter into Finster’s presence was to feel an all-embracing hospitality, compassion, good humor, and openness—toward Christians, infidels, Roman Catholics, writers, rock ’n’ roll musicians, TV journalists, Jews, dentists, gay folks, assorted Buddhists, and professors alike. In this way, the Baptist Finster was like another marvelously crafty religious visionary performer who brilliantly used words, images, and actions: the Tibetan Buddhist Dalai Lama. One was the self-proclaimed evangelical Stranger from Another World, and the other, Tenzin Gyatso, or the Dalai Lama, is a religiously declared and ritually certified reincarnation of an ancient “returned Buddha” hailing from some celestial

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“Buddha-field world.”39 Both arrived on earth as aliens from some other planet out beyond the sun—to be sure, not from the same planet, but each with a similar mission in this fallen and impermanent world. The Christian preacher and the Buddhist lama are certainly unusual by conventional standards, and each is known for an esoteric, occasionally scary, and scripturally rooted theology. Finster’s saving grace was that he, like the lama, was a partial outsider within his own tradition who always tempered his mission with charismatic charm, visionary foresight, artistic flare, engaging whimsy, ecumenical tolerance, and an amazing generosity of spirit. Their common principle of compassion and love for all people overwhelmed any narrowness of their different cultural and religious traditions. Finster, like the lama, was always willing to accept everyone into his distinctive revival tent and to dramatically and liberally expand the meaning of his scriptures. It is the total human performance of these two master religious showmen as embodied in their lives and work (one broadcasting in a manic mode and the other preaching meditative calm) that awakens us to the suffering of existence and the possibility of deliverance. Finster’s cutout paintings and the Dalai Lama’s painted mandalas are primarily signs of a liberating strangeness that call forth a response from all people whatever their particular religious persuasion or beliefs. As Flannery O’Connor might say, it was their expansive visions that made the Preacher and the Lama provocatively and productively odd. They performatively present us with serious-funny stories, images, and actions that merit our attention. I cannot pretend to tell the story of Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, in any fully informed or intimate way. But I can tell, with both knowledge and conviction, my interpretive story about Howard Finster’s improbable stories and multiple identities.

chapter 1

On the Finster Trail The Business of Howard Finster’s Divine Busyness

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. —William Blake

They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. —Andy Warhol

If I could only be a sign upon that trail If I could only be a sign upon that trail In this rugged world of time . . . I would point them to the right, To the morning star so bright. —Howard Finster

signs upon the trail Twenty-four years after my first encounter, I’m back on the Finster trail in north Georgia during the late summer of 2009. It’s hot, as August in Georgia tends to be. Really hot! And the air conditioner in my rented Hyundai is struggling to keep up with the blazing, macadam-melting heat. I had flown into the Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta several days earlier. Having established a base of operations at the house of my brother Steven, in the felicitously named town of Flowery Branch, just north of the city, I’m on the road again. I’m headed more or less north28

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west, toward Summerville and Pennville, towns sequestered in the Appalachian foothills in the northwest corner of Georgia. Several months earlier, I had received a contract to write a book about the Southern Baptist preacher, well-known folk-visionary artist, and provocative cultural figure Howard Finster. With Finster running around my brain as I drive, I find myself passing through pine-covered hills into Chattooga County on Route 27, right past the Sloppy Floyd State Park and on into the county seat of Summerville and, farther down the road, the town of Pennville, site of Finster’s Paradise Garden. Intimations of strangeness shimmer in the heat. Feeling a little nervous but also exhilarated, I’m on a mission to revisit the Finster family and to seek some signs to help me make sense of Finster’s astonishing personality and perplexing career.

brut affinities I begin with a general account of the almost impossibly broad and unwieldy category “outsider art” and its relation to Finster’s multiple identities as a preacher, tinkerer, storyteller-performer, visionary, and so-called contemporary folk, self-taught, or outsider artist. Historically, what in 1972 came to be called outsider art in English derives from a not very literal translation, by the British scholar Roger Cardinal, of a reference that the maverick French artist and cultural critic Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) made in the 1940s to an “art brut” that displayed a kind of primal and unfettered creativity.1 Given Dubuffet’s upbringing in the wine trade, there is an intriguing metaphorical linkage of art brut with what the word brut meant when found on a bottle of French Champagne. That is, méthode champenoise produces something that derives its refined and expensive elegance from a taste that is dry and fresh. More interpretively, this could be called a taste that is savage, original, natural, and somewhat astringent. Not brutal, but raw and distinctive.2 It is a kind of paradoxical refinement that is primitive (in the sense that it reflects the regional earthiness of the grapes) without any sweetly effete or sentimentalized middle-class flavor.3 Brut refers to the result of a secondary process of fermentation in making champagne, in which vintners add a dosage of sugars and yeast, yielding alcohol and gas. It is this that produces the characteristic fizz and more acerbic taste. It could, therefore, be said (especially with regard to certain self-styled refined palates) that there is an elite presumption that brut champagne has passed through the stage of sweetness only to return to some primordial condition before any kind of sentimental distortion

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or corruption. Nothing saccharine is left to mask the earthy character of the grapes. It is an end process that reverts to, or re-creates, the raw beginning of things alive with the original effervescent spirit of life. This kind of sophisticated taste for the ironic brut, or original primitive, condition of things—which is itself a kind of ultimate or transcendental cultural refinement—is not at all limited to the art of making and appreciating good champagne. It is also an oxymoronic cultural trait of the whole self-designated “anticultural” fascination with art brut or outsider art going back to the time of Dubuffet—or, even earlier and more dramatically, to the surrealists.4 For Dubuffet and his followers, art brut referred primarily, but not exclusively, to the vivid and often disturbing “art of the insane” discussed in early psychiatric writings about European asylum patients.5 Said to be cut off from the sweet, asphyxiating influences of normalcy, these artists obsessively expressed themselves visually in ways that were often unsettling but also surprisingly creative and strangely compelling. But the idea that psychiatric patients were totally oblivious to, or uncontaminated by, the surrounding culture is an impossible proposition. As with the secondary refinement necessary to produce a brut wine, psychosis could be said to represent a particular kind of consequential reaction to cultural impingements, a later fermentation that leads to a withdrawal away from the sweet comforts or repressions of mainstream cultural conformity. It represents a reversion to something more basic, primitive, anarchic, subversive, and unruly. For the insane, as with anticultural sophisticates, an unknowing or consciously ironic view of reality—where the rude or crude has value precisely because it goes against the grain of, or shocks, conventional sensibilities—becomes an all-encompassing belief system and way of life. The designation of some artists as visionary or outsider artists—as especially associated with some kind of creative insanity—is in fact the product of an elite cultural judgment that, in the spirit of the surrealist and spiritualist movements, involves artificially privileging various kinds of unconscious mentality or acutely self-conscious marginality. The English term outsider art as used by Roger Cardinal in the 1970s and 1980s came to include a broad, even wildly expansive, range of meaning that went well beyond Dubuffet’s original, and rather dogmatic, criteria. As a repository for all sorts of antimodernist and antibourgeois sentiments in art and larger cultural circles, the category of outsider art in recent history gradually embraced whatever was not typically seen as part of the mainstream, and self-referential, art school

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tradition. This involved especially the progressive elevation of low, pop, or mass cultural images and artifacts to the plane of high art. Mental illness was no longer the primary principle of inclusion, and all sorts of art by people partially marginalized in some psychological, physical, social, ethnic, religious, or cultural fashion were brought under the sideshow banner of outsider tradition. The outsider category came, therefore, to include—in differing degrees, and depending on who were the arbitrators—such things as Paleolithic cave art, tribal or aboriginal art, traditional folk art, children’s art, surrealist art, prison art, naive art, tramp art, circus art, visionary art, spiritualist-mediumistic art, tourist art, tattoo art, and so on. The one term that was largely taboo in this loose litany was primitive art. Pejorative, simplistic, and colonialist uses of the primitive label have had a long and controversial history in academic disciplines going back to disagreements over whether humans had evolutionary origins as “noble savages” or as “childish brutes.”6 African and other tribal art was, in fact, an influential factor in the emergence of modern art at the beginning of the twentieth century. But in the late 1930s in Nazi Germany, and as related to some currents of the eugenics movement, this kind of modern, art brut, and primitive art was condemned as a particularly brutal, degrading, decadent, or “degenerate” art associated with retarded races and minds.7

folk, visionary, self-taught, outsider Howard Finster was first identified as a “contemporary folk artist” who drew upon Southern, evangelical, and craft traditions, although in a idiosyncratic and often visionary way. In later years he especially became labeled a visionary artist, but also a grassroots, vernacular, self-taught, marginal, and outsider artist.8 For better or worse, and roughly since the 1980s, the terms self-taught, outsider, and more recently, vernacular have proven to be the most generously overlapping, popular, and lasting designations. The label visionary art, which loosely includes shamanistic, prophetic, mystical, surrealistic-automatic, trance, occult, and hallucinatory imagery (obviously, not all of which can be equated)—as well as a subgenre of fantasy/science-fiction-influenced imaginings—is even more problematically related to these categories.9 With regard to some consistency of content associated with these labels, and in relation to those trained artists and other opportunists who have brazenly appropriated a faux-outsider persona in response to the

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trendiness of outsider tradition, I can report only that there is no compelling consensus at this time concerning what constitutes an authentic outsider artist. If anything, the field tends to revel in the ambiguity of the nomenclature. The qualifications of this principle include the belief that “real” outsiders should not be too blatant in adopting an outsider identity or care about how their work fits into the lineage of mainstream art. Moreover, culturally marginal self-taught artists may start out as oblivious to being called outsiders, but after being discovered and sought after by collectors and dealers, they gradually if reluctantly embrace this label. Finster, for example, did not at first understand his activities as being art, folk, vernacular, or necessarily outsiderish. In the spirit of biblical prophecy, he always preferred being called a visionary artist, and he signed many of his paintings as “Man of Visions.” However, after he began to be publicly celebrated in the mid- to late 1980s, he tended to go along with the outsider terminology as an effective marketing tool to promulgate both God’s and his own messages. Finster repeatedly declared that he didn’t put any stock in the outsider label. For that matter, he did not really even care if he was called an artist. Yet he clearly relished and cultivated the attention and remuneration that such designations brought him. Throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s Finster was a kind of folksy pop superstar of the burgeoning outsider art movement. Although by definition he was outside the prevailing art circles in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, he had been embraced by many elite art patrons, dealers, and institutions. Hip New York artists and designers like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Todd Oldham, and Mark Kostabi sought him out, as did avant-garde bands such as R.E.M. and Talking Heads. In most cases, he knew what he was getting himself into (as in his appearance on the Johnny Carson show), but there were times that his growing hunger for fame got the better of him. One egregious example of this was Finster’s brush with the sleazy side of Hollywood in the late 1980s, when, led by suggestions that his visions about space travel would be made into a movie (that is, The Vision of 1982), he was taken to Los Angeles by the convicted con man Peter Paul to win a specious Spirit of America award and to be gawked at by aging celebrities.10 Finster always called such celebrity acquaintances his missionaries. The reality was always more complicated and ambivalent. The difficulty with Finster—that is, a born-again good-old-boy Baptist preacher with a sixth-grade education who created a couple of road-

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side parks and then suddenly became famous while painting tens of thousands of “nasty” apocalyptic scenes of earthly mayhem and outerspace salvation—simply did not fit comfortably into any ordinary interpretive categories in art history. Neither did Finster as a visionary, eccentric artist-preacher fit easily into American Protestant church history or into the comparative history of religions. Part of the core meaning, therefore, of the designation “outsider artist” is that it refers to someone who is an unschooled artist and is generally unaware of, and largely uninfluenced by, prevailing mainstream artistic styles and movements. The self-taught outsider is also someone who is generally ignored by the art establishment (critics, galleries, museums) and academic traditions of understanding. While these individuals are at first generally oblivious to prevailing art fashions and unaware of being an outsider or an artist, their sense of identity and destiny significantly changes if there is any special recognition of them and their work. An outsider is, then, mostly “self-taught” and is someone who feels compelled, often late in life and sometimes after an important illness or crisis, to express his or her altered relationship to the ordinary world in some artistic way, often in a two- or three-dimensional visual medium. Whereas all real visionaries can be said to be outsiders in relation to the common worldview of the dominant culture, not all outsiders are necessarily visionaries in the full-blown sense of a Howard Finster or a William Blake. For visionaries like Blake and Finster, extraordinary visionary experience of other celestial and remarkable worlds becomes a regular and often intense aspect of life, accompanied by a pressing need to communicate those visions to others. Whether visionary outsiders or outsider artists with other passions, such individuals have a common need to define themselves through their work and to labor incessantly toward creating a meaningful alternative to the dominant culture and their own personal difficulties.

who is howard finster? This is not a biographical study, but it is helpful to set out the rough narrative outline of Finster’s rural Southern upbringing and subsequent international notoriety. Mystery is present right at the outset, since there is still some ambiguity about when Finster was born: 1915 or 1916. He was himself somewhat ambivalent about this issue, and there have been arguments for the year 1915. With Pauline Finster’s blessing, the family had long settled on December 2, 1916. And it is 1916 that

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appears on the tombstone.11 Finster grew up relatively poor—the last of thirteen children, and with only a sixth-grade education—on a “hog, corn, and pea-patch” farm in northern Alabama (see figure 4). He said over and over again that his first ecstatic experience, at the age of three, was a vision of his dead sister, Abbie Rose, an event that in hindsight seemed to hint at his later prophetic career. This haunting event fit into a larger boyhood pattern of persistent dreams of flying and various vivid “out of body” experiences. He was admittedly a thoroughly strange, boundlessly curious, and surprisingly resourceful boy who, despite the irreligion of his father, was powerfully drawn to the raw revivalist Christianity in the hills of the Southern highlands. After a transformative born-again experience in his teens that he would theatrically and repeatedly recount in later life, he soon married Pauline Freeman and had five children in quick succession. Among many other odd jobs he held at this time was that of itinerant Baptist preacher in various small towns in northern Alabama and Georgia, an area that combined aspects of rural Southern culture with aspects of Appalachian culture. Leaving formal preaching in the 1960s to take up the life of a rustic entrepreneur and jack-of-all-trades in Pennville, Finster worked tirelessly on his Paradise Garden, a much more elaborate version of an earlier outdoor attraction he built in Trion, Georgia. A second bornagain event occurred when he was sixty years old, at a time when areas marginal to the “New South” of prosperous sunbelt cities like Atlanta were experiencing severe economic hardship. Finster described having had a revelatory vision of a face (some kind of visionary or hallucinatory personage) in a smear of white tractor enamel on his finger, which commanded him to paint “sacred art.” He started compulsively and often sleeplessly to paint what he thought of as burning end-time messages from God that progressively stretched the boundaries of conventional Baptist theology and his preacher’s repertory of timely Bible stories. During the late 1970s and throughout most of the 1980s, he experienced increasingly vivid and crowded visions of images and words, which he displayed on myriad eccentric, and meticulously numbered, plywood “cut out” artworks, makeshift signs with biblical and homespun admonitions, unusual junk-tower assemblages made up of all manner of scavenged materials and recycled bicycle parts, and concrete sculptures embedded with recycled debris. All of these activities and objects came together most dramatically in his Paradise Garden, a sprawling environment that also included the ramshackle multitiered World’s Folk Art Church and the elevated rolling-chair gallery.

figure 4. Howard Finster, Who Is Howard Finster? 1991. Printed poster on cardboard, 11.5 x 8.5 inches. Artwork no. 20,130. Girardot/LaBelle Collection. Photograph by Steven Lichak. © Finster Estate.

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Finster had discovered his full-blown destiny as the Man of Visions. He not only could vault in spiritual cartwheels among the clouds and talk to animals but also could see that the clouds themselves glowed with winking faces and hinted at wondrous unseen sights. For Finster these were sure signs of the storied nature of reality told of in the Bible and in his own, curious, painted and text-encrusted visions. As the selfdeclared Second Noah, and as a kind of Baptist Buck Rogers, his visionary vehicle, launched in Paradise Garden, became a kind of otherworldly spaceship-ark made of words and multiple painted images that incessantly delivered variously urgent, funny, and bizarre messages from God’s mother ship. It has been said that at the height of his renown in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Finster had more one-man exhibitions at galleries and museums than any other living artist at the time.12 The point is that during the waning years of the twentieth century, Howard Finster was a shooting star who lit up the cultural firmament with a charismatic personality and amazing art that appealed to the masses while charming a variety of intellectuals, collectors, and art mavens. There was, if truth be told, a certain degree of unsustainable and even faddish infatuation associated with the Finster phenomenon during these years. And toward the turn of the century, there were indications of a somewhat lessened enthusiasm by fans, a depleted energy on the part of Finster himself, and a diminished creativity and quality in the artwork.

afterlife The once heady accolades about Finster as a superstar visionary or outsider artist are fewer now. And as I head down state Route 27 to the Finster homestead in Summerville, Georgia, during the summer of 2009, I cannot help but reminisce about my many years of involvement with Finster, his incredible achievements, and, toward the end of his life, various difficulties involving his health and his squabbling family. Although Finster’s fame had faded and the future of the Garden was uncertain, his spirit in 2009 still lingered upon the earth and his art continued to astonish and bewilder new generations of seekers after a rough-and-ready creativity. Finster’s art was, and still is, too unruly and evangelically garish for most of the sterile, white display chambers of mainstream museums and galleries. However, whether exhibited within an urban gallery or auctioned in rural Buford, Georgia, Finster’s better work has significantly escalated in value—at first (the decade after his

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death) not as dramatically as that of some other “classic” outsiders, but much more spectacularly in recent years (2013–2014).13 When this “well-known stranger” died in 2001, a month after the cataclysmic events of 9/11, he had attained an unlikely artistic fame and pop celebrity status as a prolific self-taught visionary or outsider preacher-artist.14 Always flamboyant in the best Southern Appalachian evangelical sense, he had spectacularly transcended even the more outrageous aspects of Southern religious hyperbole. Indeed, the stories by and about Finster were legion and often improbable—ridiculous and touching, sad and joyous, charming and off-putting, strange and mundane, exhilarating and depressing, conservative and radical, and especially both serious and funny, all at the same time. His personality and career were almost always elusively suggestive of something simultaneously whimsical, remarkable, and just possibly profound. Encountering Finster—especially in his white-hot years in the 1980s, when he was hitting his stride as an outsider artist and pop celebrity— was to respond to his riotous theatrical charm and, at the same time, to feel sporadically energized by some larger spirit that dwells in all things, especially those odd and lowly fragments of worldly matter and human emotion that had been largely discarded and despised in the mainstream urban salons of Atlanta, Chicago, and New York. To contend with the simultaneous familiarity and mystery of Finster’s incandescent personality and passionate production of a garbage-art of words and images was to dimly acknowledge something deep down in the raw matter and human grain of things.

seeing pauline Having arrived in Summerville on a hot August day in 2009, I had two specific appointments with Finster’s family. At noon I was supposed to meet Finster’s daughter Beverly at Paradise Garden in Pennville, but on that morning I purchased a bouquet of flowers at the local Walmart and went to visit with Finster’s ailing ninety-one-year-old widow, Pauline, who lived in Summerville at the family “executive mansion” (as Howard Finster was proud to call the substantial complex of houses and outbuildings he was able to buy with funds from his art). Ever since Howard’s death in the early hours of October 23, 2001, the family fortunes had become increasingly caught up in financial difficulties and personal disputes. Unfortunately, many of these problems revolved around the progressive deterioration of, and infighting over, the patriarch’s surviving

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artworks and his environmental masterwork, Paradise Garden. Moreover, as Pauline entered her tenth decade, there was the added sorrow of her growing physical and mental frailty. When I saw Pauline that morning, she was wearing a pale blue smock and seemed quite alert. Even better was that her eyes suddenly sparkled when I presented her with the bouquet of flowers and gave her an old photograph I had taken of her and Howard back in the glory days in the mid-1980s. Pauline was clearly pleased to see this happy image from the past before decline and death had taken their toll on Howard. Smiling, she said that she had found some old family pictures which she wanted to share with me. After several determined but faltering attempts to find the photos in the front parlor and dining room, she took me to a back bedroom, where from a corner cabinet she triumphantly produced a packet of old black-and-white, and mostly faded, box-camera snapshots. I was delighted to see pictures from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, a few that had not yet been published in books and articles about Finster. I was especially struck by two images, one of which was a somewhat overexposed photo of a young Finster, face partially obscured and right arm uplifted, baptizing a group of women (figure 5). The women are shown from the back and apparently have the wet, stringy hair of the freshly dunked. They appear to be in a hilly grotto or, most probably, because of the swirling murkiness of the picture, in some watery baptismal hollow.15 The drama of this image seemed to capture much of the intense religious aura of Finster’s early career as a passionate itinerate preacher and purveyor of the life-giving sacrament of baptism. His partly occulted face hinted at a life of multiple personalities. I recall thinking that I would certainly want to use this photo in my forthcoming book. Whatever it lacked in clarity it more than made up in its cloudy, spirit-filled atmosphere and suggestiveness. This was a Finster powerfully moved by the Holy Ghost to give these women the intense amniotic experience of drowning and emerging into a new Christian life. There is even a vague sensual intimacy hinted at by the regenerative power that flows out of Finster’s body into the rapt women surrounding him. The other old photo that stood out (figure 6) seemed also to be from the same early-1940s era, and even the rocky backdrop looked similar (perhaps a location on or near Lookout Mountain, where the Finsters lived in the early 1940s).16 Most poignant, especially as Pauline sat on her bed silently watching me, were the two figures in the center of the picture. There was Howard neatly dressed in his Sunday best with

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figure 5. Finster baptizing women in a grotto, c. 1940s. © Finster Estate.

white shirt, striped tie, and Brylcreemed hair, looking vigorous and cocky with his left foot set on an outcropping of rock and, most conspicuously, displaying a knowing, even slightly sexy, grin on his face. Equally compelling was the other person in the picture. We see Howard’s right arm embracing a strikingly attractive and smiling Pauline dressed in a pretty, flowery dress and white high-heeled shoes with straps. Scrawled on the top right corner of the picture are the words pauline and howard, with a curious torn patch between the two names. Was this written by Pauline, and could it be that what was missing was “loves”?

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figure 6. Pauline and Howard Finster, c. 1940s. © Finster Estate.

It is impossible to know, and I was not about to ask Pauline at that time. Whatever the case, those alterations had been added at a later date, and the original photograph plainly depicted a confident and proud woman who was most likely, given the religious and social conventions of the period, “biblically submissive” to her flamboyant husband (see, for example, Ephesians 5:21–32 and Philippians 2:3). In this

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picture taken during the tough post-Depression and wartime days, Pauline seems very much a full partner with Howard, someone who is as strong as her husband if not as brashly ambitious. This was surely an exceedingly suggestive image of a young man and woman, a loving couple, certainly, united in their struggle to make their way together in a dark, dangerous, and sinful world. The picture exuded marital strength and pride, erotic energy and religious conviction. Finster’s extraordinary physical vigor included a palpable sexual energy displayed throughout his life. As he once said in one of his thought-card “comics”: “I guess I am just about the most sexiest man around when a spell [of lustiness?] hits me.” He wrote here that he often had to struggle to “wiggle around the monster” of sexual desire, but he was proud that “so far” he had managed to avoid entanglement in the sexual “dream land”—that is, as long as he “don’t get raped.” In another delightfully whimsical comic thought-card, he fantasized that he once “took a huge spoon rounded it up with peanut butter and licked it into a plump round faced girl and kissed its gentle soft lips.” Smiling, he said that this kiss was tasting so good that he ended his reverie by declaring that this “should teach” Pauline “not to give [him] a cold shoulder.”17

the business of divine busyness My other distinct memory from this encounter was Pauline’s abrupt yet telling response to my repeated query about what she most remembered about Howard. It is worth remarking that aside from a few other family photos and a semisecret stash of cheap cardboard prints produced by Howard for those who could not afford his handmade art, the house was almost entirely devoid of any significant objects or artworks made by Howard. Everything had been sold off, and even heirloom pieces of Howard’s handcrafted wood-burned furniture had been taken away for safekeeping. Losing her smile and looking straight into my eyes, Pauline bemusedly declared, and then more forcefully said again: “He was the busiest man I ever met . . . the busiest man I ever knew.” Silence! Then there was only continued silence. Her face was mostly deadpan with a tiny bit of a pursed smile. Pauline had nothing else to say. I said nothing. But I quickly realized that her singular observation, or abrupt judgment, was absolutely correct. Howard was an incredibly industrious and driven man, even obsessively and perhaps almost divinely or extraterrestrially so. As he

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would frequently and dramatically recount as part of his own evolving life-story, the first clear sign of his future destiny came when he was age three. While lost and looking for his mother in the family ’mater patch in Valley Head, Alabama, he had a vivid vision of his older sister— Abbie, who had died of complications from rabies—descending from the sky on a celestial escalator similar to Jacob’s ladder (Genesis 28:10– 19). It was this haunting incident—celebrated and mythologized in words and paint in his later years as the self-styled Stranger from Another World—that certified his fate as a man on a heavenly mission from God. And as Howard saw it, God didn’t want any slackers when it came to getting his divine work done. Finster said that Pauline was the only woman he ever loved. As much as he was a devoted family man with four daughters, a son, and multiple grandchildren, he was always bristling with a restless evangelical vigor that put him on the road to spread the good news of salvation. This physical and spiritual force was channeled beyond his wife and family into pastoring at multiple churches (some forty churches, he would say), frequent tent revivals conducted with several preaching colleagues, multiple baptisms, marriages, and various itinerant preaching activities. Amid all these religious occupations, he was also constantly involved with dozens of full- and part-time secular jobs, as well as all sorts of other crafts, moneymaking schemes, flea market sales, and diverse small and large building projects. According to Finster, he took up and was successful at more than twenty-two different trades.18 Moreover, all these activities were tirelessly undertaken before his definitive transformation in the 1970s into an outer space Baptist commissioned to produce rough-and-ready sacred artworks by the thousands. Many of these activities were undertaken to make enough money for a struggling family to survive in the economic hard times after the Great Depression and during the Second World War, particularly by those living in that starkly impoverished southeastern corner of the United States defined by the Appalachian foothills in northern Alabama, Georgia, and eastern Tennessee. Despite these difficult circumstances, Finster would declare that it was the Spirit of God—the avian Holy Ghost who passed back and forth among the heavenly and earthly planets—who called and moved him. As he realized when he was born again—that is, spiritually regenerated and saved in the Christian evangelical sense (see John 3:3)—at the age of thirteen, it was the ghostly Spirit that allowed him to fly in swooping loops and turns in the sky above all of the mundane and fallen concerns of those back on earth.19 It was the Spirit, and

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the “seven invisible members of the Holy Ghost,” that gave him the grace that enabled him to preach to, baptize, and convert sinners. So also did this spectral entity give him his ability to be God’s garbage collector and create aesthetic and monetary value out of the castoff junk of the world. Always the most insightful commentator on his own spiritual and material reclamation activities, Finster memorably declared in a painted sign in his Paradise Garden: I took the pieces you threw away And put them togather by night and day Washed by rain, dried by sun A million pieces all in one.20

the rhyme and pattern of things Such seemingly spur-of-the-moment and charmingly misspelled productions of loosely rhyming folk poetry and songs were very dear to Finster. These rhymed refrains were also deeply attractive to Finster’s growing number of fans and collectors. “I like my fans,” he once noted. Then whimsically searching for a rhyme in the manner of a rural white hiphop artist, he hoped that “maybe someday” these “fans” could all “play in the sand.”21 Sensitive to what did and did not work, he was quick to recognize and replicate a sermon, artifact, image, saying, poem, song, or performance that proved to be a hit with his various early church congregations or with his later fans and collectors. On the other hand, many of his most touching and lasting creations were hardly spontaneous. For example, there is evidence that his most remarkable and characteristic of poetic sayings about his recycling philosophy (“I took the pieces you threw away”) went through several drafts. On the back of a Tru-Life Bait order form dating to sometime in the 1970s (presumably the earlier if not the earliest version of the “million pieces all in one” poem), he says, i took the pieces you threw away and put them together by night and [by] day They are washed by the rain and dried by the sun. it will take a million pieces just to make one.22

Finster is here actively and skillfully refining his verses, especially subtracting various words and phrases in the interest of poetic economy and achieving a certain biblical cadence. Noteworthy also is that in this draft he correctly spells “together” which may or may not suggest that,

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when he realized that many of his fans were enamored of his fractured spellings, he would deliberately make charming mistakes. What offsets this cynical interpretation is simply that in later painted versions of his sayings he was acting with such furious haste that creative accidents must have frequently and unwittingly occurred. No doubt there were both unconsciously fortuitous and carefully planned elements in Finster’s later artistic career. The scrap of paper with these lines contains two other short rhyming sets of four verses, but neither one has the poetic felicitousness of the “million pieces” stanza, and he seems to have dropped them from any further consideration.23 It is clear that Finster was his own best editor in these matters of written and oral craftsmanship. His talent for poetic verse and rhyme involved a deliberative process of revisionary trial and error not dependent on any schooled principles of formal versification. If anything, his basic model or template for crafting verse was almost always the one book he knew by heart and by its resonant sound—the King James Version of the Bible.24 These speculations are reinforced by the existence of another hand-printed thought card found in proximity to the Tru-Life Bait order form and seemingly from the same time period. This card was probably drafted somewhat after the visibly edited version when he was making, as he often did, a duplicate copy of his notes. In this version, we have something close—although still without the misspelling and having several other curious discrepancies—to what became the definitive version in the evolving Finster mythology. It reads as follows: I took the pieces people Throw away. Put them Together by night and Day. They are washed by The rain and dried by the Sun a million pieces all In one.25

This version, unlike the other earlier draft, was cursively signed with the phrase “Composed by Howard Finster.” And this signature suggests that at that time he viewed it as a kind of finished version. Finished for Finster was, however, only a relative state of affairs. Even though we know about this poem’s later transmutations, it can nevertheless be said that by the time of this signed version he had perfected the basic theme, rhyming structure, or templatelike format of the poem. From this point on, the poem would stay essentially the same, though often with tiny alterations. All the known drafts and later published versions are basi-

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cally similar—making them infinitely replicable yet at the same time slightly different depending on the particular circumstances of their production. Let me also draw attention to Finster’s increasing devotion to the sign and signage of his own signature. This busy obsession would only intensify in his later years as an artist, when he knew full well that his handwritten signature instantly increased the value of the artwork.

crafting wood and words Finster was forever busily working, skillfully experimenting with, gradually refining, constantly repeating, and carefully perfecting his multiple linguistic, material, and artistic crafts. Of course, knowing when he had a hit depended on whether something sold and was popular enough to create a demand for more. But there really was more to his passion for hewing words and matter than the pressure of the market. With Finster, as with any accomplished craftsman and jack-of-all-trades, it was the experiential and temporal process of being in the thick of things that fueled his busyness. His ability as a craftsman is what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss calls the “science of the concrete” associated with the odd-job man or jack-of-all-trades (in French the bricoleur) who has a “mytho-poetical” talent for taking advantage of whatever is at hand in the interest of completing a task.26 And Finster, as a master handyman with wood and words, was also a skilled storyteller and mythmaker who used the narrative patterns of words, images, and actions in ways that communicated significant messages. For Finster, concrete material things—whether wood, written words, sounds, paint, or (literally) concrete—were always potentially signs when expressively crafted in the right and ritual manner. Matter matters when it is given the symbolic power to do so. The medium and matter of whatever Finster was doing made all the difference. Words, especially those in poems and songs, were in this way like wood for Finster. You had to handle words, sonorously whittle them, and even playfully fondle their infinite rhyming possibilities to make something beautiful and memorable out of them. The rule of his mind, hand, and mouth was always to follow the inner grain of wood and words—of all things. In this vein, the pre-1976 Finster often pondered the special process and joy of working with “Gods great trees” and with the related sound, signs, and storied flow of words. He never left a scrap of wood or a clump of words uncaressed. He says that he “took the wood from Gods great trees and shaped it in a thousand

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ways.” After recounting the “manny” ways he crafted wood, including his numerous unique designs for clock cases, he was reminded that his love for God’s timber “looks back” to the biblical tale of Joseph and Jesus, who also both worked with wood.27 There was, in other words, an underlying narrative that grounded Finster’s sacred craftsmanship and biblically inflated sense of self. Finster’s obsessive, and biblically framed, concern for finding the grain, pattern, or design of things is displayed by his lifelong attraction to the rhyme, rhythm, and narrative structure of oral and written words. And again I draw specific attention to how his early career as a preacher of the Word of God as expressed in the rhythmic English pulse and structured cadence of the King James Version of the Bible would have been central to his acute sensitivity to the rhythmic and narrative power of words. In his later life as a visual artist, this talent is also suggested in his creative mastery of intricately patterned line drawings, ingenious graphic designs, and complicated image-word compositions.

god’s sign man Finster’s later artistic and graphic works often harbor multiple embedded Bible stories and images, as well as conjoined layers of hand-printed text laden with scriptural quotations and personal homilies. This aspect of Finster’s craft and art was certainly originally rooted in his performative practice as an evangelical preacher of the biblical word, which depended on his talent for moving his congregation as much with his rhythmic emphasis and ritual theatrics as with the actual content of his sermons. These were often sermonic performances visually augmented with chalk-talk diagrams, scriptural charts of the roads to salvation or perdition, and strategically employed revival-tent props.28 Indeed, the aural and visual theatricality of evangelical preaching—a dramatic performance art designed to market salvation to the masses of the damned— resonated with the emergence in the 1940s and 1950s of a mass advertising business of roadside signage and attractions crafted to sell the commercial bounty of industrial America. The point was to use every means possible, whether sacred or secular, to communicate and sell the life-enhancing advantages of the Holy Ghost’s amazing grace, Jesus’s saving cross, Coke’s healing elixir, Burma-Shave’s wondrous salve, Ripley’s wondrous oddities, or the miraculous view of seven states found at the tourist attraction Rock City. While not specifically religious like the ubiquitous Jesus saves

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signs in the South, even the original Rock City signs had something vaguely mythic and ritualistic to say about American life that went beyond their simple commercial message. They told of a paradisiacal time in a post–World War II America when the medium of the open road pointed to the possibility of infinite freedom and wondrous discovery. Furthermore, slick signs made of words and images sell, particularly the ones that manage to tell or suggest a story and a slogan. Get right with the Lord for tomorrow you die! A Man a Miss / A Car a Curve / He kissed the Miss / And Missed / The Curve / Burma-Shave! The impact of this upon evangelical tradition and Finster is suggested by the increasing popularity throughout the mid- to late-twentieth-century South of advertising slogans or “attention-getting sayings” for church signs, bulletin boards, and newsletters.29 As Finster would often say about his myriad patchwork words, images, cutouts, and constructions, all his work represented multiple “signs and messages from God.” His work in this way harkened back to his early experience as an itinerate roadside preacher who traveled the byways of the South, which were increasingly lined with both commercial and religious signage.30 It appears that Finster was fully aware of the maker of the most famous of these early roadside religious signs, Henry Harrison Mayes (1898–1986). Mayes was known as the evangelical Sign Man, Cross Builder, and God’s Own Messenger and was especially active during the 1940s and 1950s throughout the Appalachian region. Mayes was also someone who made his home (in Middlesboro, Tennessee) into a religious environment and attraction. He called it his House of Many Crosses, and this structure resonates with, and perhaps influenced, Finster’s religious-themed parks in Trion and Pennville.31

many signs and patterns The more signs the better, which to Finster meant that as he neared his end of days, almost 50,000 works of art produced at his easel in the Garden or while reclining on what he called his “vibratin’ bed” in his Summerville sanctuary. If we accept the relative accuracy of Finster’s own numbering system, he died having finished his 46,991st painting. This last work was a rather dispirited cutout image of the country singer Hank Williams done with muddled Sharpie paint pens and given a lopsided face and messy angels, reflective of the pain and ill health Finster was experiencing at the time.32 The reality is that Finster produced many other unnumbered artworks both inside and out of Paradise Garden—

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some going back to before 1976 and the divine directive to produce sacred art. It may well be that Howard Finster was the most amazingly prolific American artist of the twentieth century. If all his myriad self-printed works, handouts, tapes, and other ephemera were counted, he might even be the most productive artist of all time, a temporal triumph of his furious busyness that he would certainly cherish. It is true, of course, that most of these works were his production-style “multiples” and dimensional “cutouts,” but the fact is that, unlike Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst, he had a hand in finishing every single one of the works he produced. Putting aside for the time being the issue of the quality of his work in relation to its prodigious quantity, Finster’s need to count and record his artistic output was very much an aspect of his marketing savvy, heroic industry, and self-affirming sense of sacred destiny. For Finster, it never was only the beauty of his signage art that counted. It always seemed that sheer quantity mattered more than quality and testified to the superhuman nature of his labor. These numbers— as much as his growing fame, financial success, hoards of adoring collectors, and celebrity admirers—were the ultimate proof of his prophetic destiny. As in a good advertising campaign, it was repetition and quantity that got the message out to the multitude. The power of roadside signage never depended only on the beauty of the images or their folksypoetic cleverness. It was also intrinsically linked to the overwhelming ubiquity of the signs, their inevitable reappearance on the next stretch of road. Wherever you turned, there was another sign calling attention to itself. Then another. The inexorable power of multiples. Drink a Coke and be refreshed! See Rock City and see the whole country! Accept Jesus and be saved! Over and over again. The raw power of larger and larger numbers of images and words. The brute power of excess. The preacher, craftsman, sign maker, and phenomenal multiplier Howard Finster clearly had a gift for language, patterns, and narrative form that, like all good advertising, attracted an audience. Moreover his honed-on-the-Bible feel for the aural rhythm of words, the power of images, and the framing potential of stories was also graphically rehearsed and visually objectified by his early habit of constantly jotting down, preserving, and even making careful duplicate copies of his copious notes, records, account ledgers, journals, stories, songs, observations, poems, thoughts, plans, and so on—all repetitiously and meticulously transcribed on whatever scrap of paper or cardboard was at hand. Many of these transcriptions—frequently found jotted on his thought cards or vision

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cards (the latter were cards or scraps of paper that primarily contained descriptions of his visionary travels and experiences)—were embellished with small sketches or diagrams setting out some schematic insight. Finster’s many biblical and made-up stories, song compositions, and poems often combined an acute penchant for drawing out or visually extracting verbal patterns as well as the poetic structure and beat of oral rhymes. In one of Finster’s notes to himself, regarding the rhyming blueprint for one of his poems, “A Peep at His Power” (the poetic template is shown in the right hand column: night:might:things:sing:day:play: sun:done:sea:me:ways:days:light:sight), we also see his growing fascination with the graphic flourish and potency of his own signature, a telltale sign of his lifelong project of constantly reiterated and expanded self-construction.33 In a manner suggestive of his later practice on his paintings, he makes a point of noting the exact time that he completed this poem: “Composed and written 11:37 am Sept. 13, 1970.” The message of these habitual activities is that Finster clearly understood that his own life had a special energetic tempo and a narrative pattern or plot informed by biblical rhythms, stories, and images. A master craftsman who trimmed and plumbed his woodwork, and a carpenterpainter who made his own handcrafted frames for his paintings, Finster was forever shaping and defining his life in increasingly extravagant narrative frames of biblical bric-a-brac. He was a man with a growing sense of his own sacred mission in life—a destiny that he fully comprehended only when its complete design was unveiled in his later life: his destiny as a visionary artist and outer-space prophet. Finster’s experience as a visionary artist in his later life (especially after his finger-face vision in 1976) represented the visual fulfillment, or divine extension, of biblical patterns he had already started to recognize and embellish in his earlier life. In many ways, therefore, it was the selfstyled convergence of his life’s story with biblical narratives, prophetic dreams, TV programs, Cold War history, nuclear fears, and his own quirky visions that led to his final career as the Second Noah, apocalyptic visionary, outsider artist, and pop celebrity. Finster himself—his incessant busyness, multiple biblical and personal stories, dreams of flying, odd visions, and endlessly repeated artworks—collectively became a potent sign upon the long trail of cultural life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As he reminded us in one of his drafts for a poem or song from the late 1960s (see the “If I could only be a sign” epigraph to this chapter), his very presence on earth was a sign of the times. And in that “rugged world of time,” when American culture was dramatically

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changing, he had the herculean strength, visionary audacity, and “super brain” to embrace the darkness while at the same time always pointing toward the possibility of a “morning star so bright.”34

clock time and finster’s time The “rugged world of time” was always a pressing issue for Howard Finster. At the end of his life this rugged time became the issue of an impending end-time; but, as seen from the very beginning, there was never enough time to accommodate all that he wanted to accomplish. As suggested by the scriptures that tell of God’s hidden blueprint in time, Finster was forever and sometimes frantically seeking out the concealed patterns of life, a story or stories that increasingly seemed to involve him as a central protagonist. When Finster took some rare time off from his regular church work and his many other vocational activities in the early days before he became God’s chosen sign painter, he still felt compelled to show off his extraordinary energy and his ability to make something attractive, useful, and valuable out of whatever was at hand. During sporadic summer vacations in Florida, he was even driven to produce gigantic sand castles all over the beach, to the delight of not only his family but also the crowds of onlookers.35 As has been noted, these trips to coastal Florida were also occasions to stop en route “at roadside tourist museums, zoos, and alligator farms. In St. Augustine, Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum and the Fountain of Youth were family favorites.”36 This endemic fascination with roadside attractions, like his incessant attention-seeking and epic industriousness, was rooted in Finster’s playful yet always self-promoting sense of mission. But it also reflects the work ethic of his rural German-Celtic Appalachian heritage, in which one—especially when relatively impoverished in relation to the greater world—proudly and productively used what others took for granted, even junk, and made the most of every waking hour. Howard and Pauline Finster never considered themselves poor or lower class, since they always held on to a faith in their ability—through hard work, persistence, and creative resourcefulness—to craft their lives together and to overcome all hardships. Finster’s superhuman labors, although often self-aggrandizing, were also undertaken for the benefit of his family, his church, and the larger community of neighbors and friends; and ultimately, as he would say, they were for all of God’s people. Using time therapeutically, profitably, and mischievously was a special passion for Finster throughout his life.

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This is apparent in, for example, his early dedication to tent revivals, which renewed the spirit and temporarily reversed the sinful condition. The same motivations were present in the construction of his first museum park, in Trion, Georgia, in the 1950s. There he created a miniature world of heavenly, tiered mansions for children and adults (the “tiered” architectural template runs through much of his work, from painted images to sculptures and to the World’s Folk Art Church). A similar kind of temporal theme is evident in reflections on the thought cards he made throughout his life, as well as in his efforts to give renewed vitality to what was old and decrepit by refurbishing discarded bicycles for the poor children in his community in Pennville in the 1960s and 1970s. For all of Finster’s honest concern for family and community, there was also the reality of his character as an inveterate show-off and braggart. This tangled self-centered and altruistic busyness was also materially and characteristically displayed in the way Finster’s very popular handcrafted wooden clocks produced a significant monetary return on his investment of energy and time. His unremitting attempt to build perpetual-motion machines likewise dramatized his consuming passion for salvifically overcoming the entropy of the temporal condition by constant work. It was never the not-quite-perfected end product that counted, but rather the process of using time to lose time. To be always absorbed in the process, flow, and trance of work was for Finster a way to be totally, semiecstatically disassociated from the banality and weariness of time, at least temporarily. Time on earth in this sense was transcended by Finster via his own enraptured hyperproductivity, and it would ultimately come to permanent rest in God’s clockless realm in the outer space of heaven. As Finster once noted, In my Fathers mansion theres no clocks on the wall you wear your parts down thin counting time to an end But for me I’ve hardly begin. Oh clock of time who chimes.37

Some of Finster’s multifarious reflections on time, along with his related sketches and constructions, express a homespun kind of existentialist philosophy of temporality. Among many possible examples, two thought cards, probably from the late 1960s or early 1970s, record some particularly fascinating Finsterian musings on time. The first of these is a sketch of a tiny clock (a “little three legged tick tock” showing the time as a quarter after twelve) drawn with a spiral array of sayings like: “You could never be my clock for you don’t run eturnal” and “I

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will be living when your gear wheels are wore t[o] a frazil. . . . Don’t think you will count all my time away no sir my time is for ever.” The other jotting is less whimsical and more dreamily suggestive about “breaking loose from clock time.” As he breathlessly and almost philosophically notes, “I have used up my past days every one of them waiting for coming time which continually appears out of the unknown stream of tomorrow which never gets here breaking aloose from clock time to you and me from daylight to darkness from darkness to light.”38

finster’s “brain cell warehouse” Howard Finster was always a remarkably active and preoccupied man. He ardently refused to submit to the boredom of merely passing time, to the terror of history, or to the accidents of his social and economic condition. These were, after all, issues that he would have called the sinfulness that defines the “rugged world of time.” He constantly used time creatively, craftily, and constructively for himself and others, rather than letting random circumstances determine his fate. For Finster, the externally difficult and sometimes distressing aspects of his life—the devil’s work of relative social and cultural marginality, economic difficulties, family friction, minimal formal education, bodily disease, and old age—were to be confronted with a realistic optimism, constant industry, resourceful courage, and transformative joy. This saving grace resulted from his conviction in the regenerative powers of his creative spirit, his physical energy, and his own special mission as a conduit of that energy and spirit to others. It was all due to what he called the invisible members of the Holy Ghost. As Finster himself said, he had the ability to regenerate the skin in his worn-down paint-fingers like a lizard or snake can periodically renew its overall integument. Furthermore in his evangelical and visionary self-understanding, Finster believed that he had a special destiny told of in many different biblical, popular, and interplanetary stories about a man, like the prophet Noah of old or Buck Rogers of the future, on a heroic mission to confront the inevitably destructive flood of time. This was a man with a born-again, interplanetary calling. This was a man, like himself, who possessed superhuman strength and a saving vehicle (ark or spacecraft, garden and church). Although having only a sixth-grade education, Finster was blessed with a “brain cell warehouse” and a “computerized brain from God” (see figure 7).39 He was someone with a mission to show all of us the signs of the times.

figure 7. Howard Finster, Brain Cell Warehouse, c. 1979. Print on paper, 15 x 11.5 inches. Artwork no. 1440. From Folk Image (Tappahannock, VA: American Folk Art Co., n. d.). Girardot/LaBelle Collection. Photograph by Steven Lichak. © Finster Estate.

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Finster once said there was “no doubt in my mind that I have had the greatest working strength of any man who has been on earth’s planet except Jesus Christ.”40 Here his ostentatious business of busyness was clearly motivated by a progressively messianic self-inflation, and the quietly domestic Pauline must have found it ever more challenging to simultaneously love, support, and tolerate her husband’s celebrity and constantly frantic activities—whether eccentrically religious, weirdly artistic, often improbable, or sometimes simply silly. The problem for someone close to—even worse, married to—a person like Finster on a self-proclaimed, intense mission from God is that it is often difficult to distinguish between godliness and narcissism, between compulsive visionary saintliness and simple self-centered folly. Pauline’s silence after she told me what she remembered most about Howard—and which initiated these extended reflections—was a sign. But it was only one among many signs along the Howard Finster trail. Among self-proclaimed God-touched visionaries or outer-space heroes, this kind of spousal frustration is not an uncommon state of affairs. For example, Catherine Sophia, the supportive yet long-suffering wife of the eighteenth-century English visionary artist and poet William Blake, was wont to remark that it became increasingly difficult to see her husband because he spent much of his time by himself up in the heavens communicating with the spirits.41 Blake too, it must be said, was an exuberantly busy man on a celestial mission.42 Like Finster, he fully embodied the principle that the “road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”43 Distinguishing between the creative ecstasy of a visionary and the delusional mania of a madman, as associated with maverick figures like Blake and Finster, is not an easy matter, and how you distinguish between them depends on whom you ask. Thus wives and patrons, neighbors and friends, artists and psychologists, and religion scholars and sociologists will no doubt come to different conclusions.

saint, shaman, or shyster? Regarding Howard Finster’s artistic-religious passion and formidable busyness, there is surely a significant difference between a visionary sacred madness and a socially dysfunctional psychosis, albeit often an uncertain distinction. Both states of mind are culturally conditioned, but that does not mean these are forms of altered consciousness that differ only in terms of their degree of trancelike disassociation, absorptive intensity, or alienation. Unfortunately, there is still little real consensus

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on the nature of the difference.44 An examination of Howard Finster may lead to surprisingly divergent assessments. One of the important issues continuously pondered throughout this book is whether Finster was a visionary mystic, an opportunistic showman, or just a crazy old coot. Was he a visionary artist or a con artist; was he a saint, a shaman, or a shyster? It’s not an easy matter to choose either one or the other. The point is, Finster was a visionary artist with a religious message who was fully functional in the everyday world. Indeed his visions, as materialized in his art and Garden, often had a transformative, even healing, effect on those who had eyes to see. And in this sense of his miraculous energy and therapeutic power, we might think of Finster as an evangelical and artistic saint. But such designations of earthly holiness are almost always compromised. As Christopher Hitchens once maliciously said of Mother Teresa, it was her popular self-made myth that beatified her even before any official action by the Catholic Church. But never is such mythmaking a one-way enterprise. “In the gradual manufacture of an illusion,” says Hitchens, “the conjurer is only the instrument of the audience. He may even announce himself as a clever prestidigitator and yet gull the crowd. Populus vult decipi—ergo decipiatur [The people want to be deceived and so they will be].”45 The nature of visionary or ecstatic experience—as well as the question of artistic creativity and its relation to insanity, duplicity, or the strategic arrogance of “genius”—remains ambiguous. Many examples are possible, running the gamut from Leonardo da Vinci to Vincent van Gogh. In fact, similar questions surfaced quickly after the death of the Apple guru, nominal Zen Buddhist, absent father, flawed cultural hero, and self-styled designer-artist Steve Jobs. Bluntly put, was he a creative genius or simply a lucky shit?46 Of course, entrepreneurs, geniuses, gurus, saints, and artists frequently absolve themselves of any bad behavior precisely on the grounds that that is just the way it is for truly exceptional individuals. Certainly such designations are elastic and often self-validating.47 So maybe the contradictory qualities associated with especially creative people—or truly gifted tinkerers or tweakers such as a Howard Finster or a Steve Jobs—are to at least some significant degree interrelated?48 As the history of religions has amply documented without any help needed from Hitchens, saints are not always saintly.49 But this does not mean they are not real saints.

chapter 2

Signs of the Times Howard Finster and Prophetic Reenchantment

A man can’t soar too high, when he flies with his own wings. —William Blake

Well, as far as I’m concerned, I’m not here to live a normal life. I’m sent here on a mission. —Howard Finster

“It ain’t my imagination!” [Finster] says. “You people are always writing about my imagination! It makes me sick! I tell them that what I get comes from another world! It comes from God! And they always say I got good imagination!” —Jack Hitt

saying good-bye to howard Before leaving Pauline Finster’s house that morning back in 2009, I arranged to meet Finster’s youngest daughter, Beverly, at Paradise Garden in Pennville. This would be my chance to renew our relationship and to tell her about my plans to write an interpretive study of Finster’s intertwined religious and artistic career. As I drove back to the Garden, where I was to meet Beverly for lunch, I could not help but think about her father’s final departure for other worlds and the numerous times, since 1985, I had been with him in Pennville and Summerville. My most vivid memories had to do with the last time I saw Finster alive. This encounter was at his house in Summerville in the summer 56

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figure 8. Howard, Snoopy, and Pauline, 1995. Stephanie and Robert Tardell Collection. Photograph by Stephanie Tardell.

before his death, in October 2001. Pauline was there as well, along with their yippy little white dog, Snoopy (figure 8). This was a bittersweet recollection, since Finster appeared outwardly cheerful and yet, in addition to complications from “the sugar” (a Southernism for his adultonset diabetes), had not fully gotten over a bout of pneumonia that had begun after an ill-fated appearance at the American Folk Art Museum in New York in the winter of 2000. At that time, in 2001, Finster seemed nervously apprehensive about keeping up his faltering artistic production. He had been halfheartedly working on a large, four-by-four-foot, one of a kind, commissioned plywood cutout of an elephant painted shakily by paint pen, which remained forlornly unfinished in his garage. Throughout our time together at the house, Howard fretted about being able to finish this uninspired painting. He seemed fragile and weary and, most unusually, somewhat unwilling to talk about much of anything that day. His characteristic energy and industriousness had, sadly, diminished. After sharing a hastily prepared lunch of fried okra, green tomatoes, ham, and Coca-Cola at the house with Pauline and Howard, along with their grandson Michael, who was living there at the time, I said good-bye. Feeling a sense of sorrow and foreboding, I headed back to my brother’s

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home just north of Atlanta. I would never see Howard Finster alive again. And here I was in Summerville again, some eight years after that last disheartening encounter with Finster. I had been back in 2004 to visit the family and consult with collectors, dealers, and curators in Georgia as part of a large retrospective exhibition at Lehigh University dedicated to the proposition that Finster, among all his mass-produced cutouts, had also produced what could only be called masterworks. Now, in 2009, it was my intention to bring my long association with Finster to a conclusion by writing about my evolving reflections on this extraordinary man and his place in the history of American art, religion, and culture. Because he had been anointed as a “classic” American outsider by Raw Vision in 2002, an important British journal of record for the overall field of outsider art, Howard Finster was definitely more than a passing novelty.1 Nevertheless, there was always some danger that he would ultimately be forgotten or dismissed as an amusing cultural accident or religious curiosity. An even more distressing opinion asserted that Finster’s art was “just plain fun,” “kind of cute,” or perhaps the forerunner of what some would call the creeping “Hello Kitty” side of outsider art.2 This cuteness factor—coupled with a sentimentalized, nonironic, nostalgic, and literal understanding of evangelical religion— might even suggest that Finster’s work was a kind of self-taught and backwoods Southern analog to the calculated California kitsch of Thomas Kinkade (1958–2012).3 Despite some superficial similarities (their marketing prowess, evangelical Christianity, penchant for self-promotion, and nostalgic sensibility), Finster was certainly more creative and original as an artist and visionary. Furthermore, Finster’s best work was never simply pretty or sentimental. Whether Finster was more of a backwoods Kinkade than a rustic Warhol, Blake, or Joseph Cornell is not such a difficult question. The issue really comes down to Kinkade’s ever-present prettiness as opposed to Finster’s, Blake’s, and Cornell’s penchant for evoking something surprisingly mysterious and interestingly provocative. Even in many of his mass-produced cutout images and texts, Finster sought eccentrically and humorously to stretch biblical conventions and popular preconceptions. He was never afraid to be blatantly peculiar. The difference in these artists’ work, then, hinges on the uneasy feelings of confused curiosity and edgy amazement associated with Finster, Blake, and Cornell’s best work as opposed to the aesthetics of mawkish familiarity and cuteness found universally in Kinkade.

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Looking at There is a House of Gold (plate 2), one of Finster’s crudely beautiful paintings from 1978 (or more precisely December 18, 1978, no. “1,000 and 271,” which was Finster’s way of writing 1,271), is quite different from the experience of viewing Kinkade’s glibly maudlin cottage paintings. Painted on wood in bright yellow, white, and green tractor-enamel paint, and displayed in a hand-tooled frame, Finster’s work uses a radiant abundance of glitter and gold paint to highlight the central image of a sketchily interlaced group of tiered and spired mansions. All of this is accompanied by a rough inscription at the bottom of the painting inspired by the Bible verse John 14:2–3, which proclaims that “in my father’s house are many mansions.” The real significance of this painting is that, in a Blakean spirit, it is a “vision emblem” of something existing “beyond the light of the sun.” It is a kind of divine cartoon or icon of heavenly worlds that Finster has been privileged to visit in his visions. And it was Finster’s mission to reveal this invisible “house of gold.” As he says on the painting, the “truth” of this image “no one has told.” What is seen is Finster in the process of mastering his technique as a painter of visionary templates, images that exist only in other unseen divine and celestial worlds. He wants to convey a message, but it is not simply a matter or message of comforting prettiness. It is an uncommon truth that is more roughly iconic, hidden, and spiritual.

artistic and religious affinities Finster’s affinities with Blake’s and Cornell’s artistic explorations of visionary worlds are significantly more revealing than any continued reflections on Kinkade. The comparison of Finster and Blake as astronauts of visionary experience will surface throughout this book. It is also worth noting here that, although Finster was no Joseph Cornell in relation to the latter’s more reclusively, austerely, and surrealistically constructed cosmic visions, there is nevertheless an enigmatic current of ethereal nostalgia that connects both of these very different, yet oddly similar, self-taught American visionary eccentrics.4 Both were compelled to reveal the invisible mystery—whether an evangelically biblical mystery or the metaphysical attitudes of Christian Science metaphysics—inherent in the scavenged debris of the world. Both produced painted and boxed signs of something that most of us see only dimly or not at all. Both sought out, framed, and boxed up the strangeness of things. Both were visionary makers of miniature worlds; and it must be said that Finster’s work at times displayed almost Cornell-like crystalline interplanetary structures.5

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Finster’s work also displays elements of the totally inclusive pop sensibility of Warhol, Haring, and Basquiat. What for many appeared to be the fundamentalist simplicity of his southern Appalachian roots, his evangelical upbringing, and his later visionary experience, coupled with the Bible-cartoon crudity of his artistic work, was perhaps not so straightforward or naive. The temptation to trivialize Finster—as only a latter-day Southern primitive best interpreted in terms of some Kinkadelike sentimentality and an “identity art” quest for authenticity—that motivated many middle-class dealers and collectors was ever present.6 However, there was always just enough residual ambiguity and power associated with Finster’s visionary weirdness and raw artistic creativity to resist any one-sided rush to judgment. My ongoing fascination with Finster is related to the possibility that he had something revealing to say about religion and art not merely as separate and distinct activities but as intriguingly, and perhaps intrinsically, intertwined aspects of the human enterprise in relation to the evolution and basic dynamics of human nature and culture and to the real existence of other worlds of experience. Contrary to common discussions about the relation of religion and art (meaning here all forms of expressive and performative skill), Finster’s work suggests that it is never a matter that religion uses or appropriates art simply to embellish some conventional message or religious content. Finster’s art is designed to communicate a message, but that message is regularly biblically explicit and subversively implicit. Nor is art simply the inevitable secular replacement of religion—where the human taste for beauty, the sublime, the funky, the ironic, and the strange supplants our need for some kind of imagined sacred, spirit, or gods. Perhaps the art act itself—the crafty-imaginative-artistic-creative process as much as any specific content—is the religious message. Religion and art might be seen, therefore, as interrelated skill systems along the evolutionary trail that imaginatively communicate, create, and re-create human worlds. They accomplish this because they function imaginatively, symbolically, and narratively as signage for establishing the multiple meanings or messages of the worlds we inhabit. In the best sense, and although they can often produce the opposite effect, both art and religion seem naturally to work together to hint at, to signify, and at times to reveal the sacred, spirit, beauty, sublimity, and strangeness hidden in the material heart of all things.7 Religion and art are cultural sign systems that draw our attention to what is potentially special or extraordinary about life.8 They call forth a response and give

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us the faith to live meaningfully in a given world. This is the creative and imaginative “skill” of art and religion, which are symbolic and storied sign systems that go back to the Paleolithic and shamanistic interaction of religious vision, artistic expression, myth-ritual performance, and technological innovation. My suspicion was that Finster’s life story as a remarkable concatenation of words, actions, and images really did point toward the relative similitude of religion and art and the interpenetration of visionary ecstasy and artistic creativity. There seemed to be a message in all the handmade signs, one that went beyond any conventional evangelical reading of the Bible. My growing appreciation of the dual religious and artistic significance of Finster’s paradise of discarded junk led me to contemplate what has been called the “banality of the sacred” or, perhaps more accurately for Finster, the multitude of religious and aesthetic meanings that can be creatively communicated by artistically repurposed trash.9 Finster truly had taken the “pieces . . . you threw away / And put them togather by night and day / Washed by rain, dried by sun / A million pieces all in one.” Whatever the proportion of the pieces precious and thrown away, serious and trivial, the fact is that Finster himself is surely a sign about the need to confront the brokenness of human existence. He and his healing art constitute a sign of how a meaningful world may be re-created out of millions and millions of broken shards. It is true that Finster was able to put roughly only fifty thousand pieces back together, but he did, rather like Joseph Cornell, show all of us the spiritual power of visionary assemblage. That is, how—by night and day—we too could put things back together again, all in one. And to know that is to know that it makes no difference whether these broken things are treasure or trash, marble or concrete, beautiful or ugly. And it is also to know and to accept the fact that these patchwork operations of religion and art are always temporary. To know and act on these messages requires that we respond to the signs given to us by visionary shamans, prophetic dreamers, outer-space Baptists, and all kinds of outsider artists. This response involves many emotions, but at its heart is the nostalgic remembrance of the connection between childhood wholeness and adult disintegration. And these are memories sporadically punctuated by tiny epiphanies about the interrelationship of the familiar, the material, the spiritual, the strange, the sublime, and the sacred. With these feelings comes the recognition that all these extraordinary qualities are present in all things—high and low, washed by rain and dried by sun.

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Critics like Roberta Smith of the New York Times, Donald Kuspit, and others have recognized that Finster’s ascendancy in the 1960s through the early 1990s coincided with various pop art, performance art, and postmodernist developments.10 These movements included a fascination with marginality and physicality as well as a return to neoexpressionist figurative painting, a quasi-ritualistic emphasis on earth-art environments and the ecologically sensitive reclamation of discarded materials, and a growing interest in the mash-up linkage of images and words. Also evident, as seen in the startling transformation of Philip Guston’s work from abstract expressionism to grotesque, pop-arty, postpunk cartoonlike banality, was a concern for all forms of “high” and “low” image production; a playful fascination with narrative cartoon art and so-called graphic novels; political-social-existential commentary; and an overall popular and primitivist infatuation with outsider art and self-taught artists.

prophetic reenchantment What was not fully recognized was how Howard Finster and his visionary “sacred art” coincided with a growing general convergence of art, religion, and spirituality that challenged many modernist assumptions about how elite art, along with science, would necessarily and triumphantly replace religion.11 Mainstream academic circles during most of the twentieth century were largely convinced by a thesis of the great German sociologist Max Weber stating that the post-Enlightenment modern world would become increasingly secular, rational, technical, and “disenchanted.” This was, moreover, a state of affairs that could only escalate as the twenty-first century arrived.12 But then, contrary to such theoretical prophecies, the gods and spirits of every imaginable mythic type, and light and dark disposition, came roaring back! If there is even partial agreement about cultural trends in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is simply that the secularization theory about the inevitable demise of religion needs drastic revision. Reenchantment is in the air these days in all sorts of messy formulations.13 That which is secular and material turns out to be as uncanny as anything ever observed in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem or in the holy city of Mecca. Likewise within the academy in this post-9/11 era, religion has become a pressing issue for all sorts of humanistic and social science disciplines that had formerly spurned any overt interest. The very beginning of the new postmodern, or more accu-

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rately and awkwardly, the post-postmodern, millennium was mostly an unexpected revivalist story of a new rush hour of assorted gods, spirits, ghosts, zombies, vampires, and other unruly specters. This deluge of gods of every variety is associated with an all-pervasive global religious resurgence, which—particularly within aggressive currents in both Christianity and Islam, as well as within still officially atheistic and communist countries like China—has a pronounced evangelical and proselytizing spirit. At the same time, there is a general emphasis on personal religious experience (when “God talks back”), and a broad eclectic emphasis on popular forms of provocative visual imagery and social-media networking as found on streaming video, computer games, and the World Wide Web. As was seen in the catastrophic events of 9/11 and the never-ending war on terror, various self-righteously dark forces of religious and political fundamentalism are also circulating and expanding around the globe.

praying with beverly In the midst of my random reveries about Finster, Kinkade, Blake, Cornell, art and religion, and global reenchantment, I was suddenly jerked back into the very mundane parking lot alongside the gift shop on the northwest side of the now cyclone-fenced Paradise Garden. Pacing back and forth in the heat while waiting for Beverly, I reflected on my earlier phone conversation with her. She had made it clear that she was eager to meet with me. Somewhat mysteriously, she even indicated that she had something important to tell me. I had purposely arranged to meet her at the entrance to the Garden because I wanted also to make contact with the new caretakers who had taken over the maintenance and restoration of Finster’s biblical environment and art park. The future of the Garden was a controversial topic among Finster enthusiasts. Ever since the time of Finster’s deteriorating health and withdrawal to Summerville, some five miles south of the Garden, in the early 1990s, Paradise Garden had suffered the degradation of neglect and weather. Also disturbing for many, although it had been partly blessed by Finster himself, was the indignity of the loss of many of the more important Garden artworks to museums and private collections or their simple disappearance.14 Most discouraging was that one of the signature structures in the Garden, the multitiered World’s Folk Art Church, was dangerously close to collapsing in on itself. And the elevated zigzag gallery, or rolling-chair gallery, or “flying gallery” as Finster sometimes

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called it, that ran through the center of the Garden was largely riddled with damp, festering mold and sagging plywood. The sadness of decay and decrepitude sweetly scented the air. In the mid-1990s Beverly had purchased the Garden from her father and made a good-faith, though mostly unsuccessful, effort to maintain and improve the site as a tourist attraction by surrounding it with a chain-link fence and charging admission. However, the Garden had now been sold to a nonprofit organization under the leadership of the Reverend Tommy Littleton, a young evangelical minister from Birmingham, Alabama. Littleton and his group seemed dedicated to warding off any further deterioration of the Garden and, when funds became available, to rescuing the Folk Art Church and refurbishing the overall site. These were encouraging developments, and much of my previous cynicism about the future of the Garden lessened. Some real headway had been made in getting it officially designated as a county and state landmark and in putting together a regional and national group devoted to the preservation of Finster’s vision. I suddenly saw a late-model white Mercedes drive up that seemed out of character with the impoverished neighborhood and the state prison across the road from the Garden. Beverly, an attractive woman in her fifties with a bright though wary smile, bounded out of the car. After greeting each other and hugging briefly in the parking lot, we agreed to drive to one of the few locally run restaurants in Summerville. Walmarts, McDonald’s restaurants, Dollar Stores, and their homogenized ilk had now, sadly, overwhelmed almost everything else on the single main highway, State Route 27, running through town and all the way up to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Arriving at the restaurant I couldn’t help but notice the determined look on Beverly’s face and a certain beatific glint in her eyes. I felt a twinge of nervousness. We sat down at a side table in a room filled with a dozen or so other patrons, and after reminiscing a bit about Howard and the family, Beverly suddenly took hold of both my hands from across the table and started to pray in a loud, head-turning, way. This was not some kind of straightforward evangelical grace before meals, but rather a long, heartfelt declaration of Beverly’s own return to Jesus. She continued the prayer by affirming her renewed friendship with her sister Thelma and stressing her concern for her mother’s health. She vowed to make sure, most of all, that her father’s holy message to the world was continued. I tried as much as possible to suppress my formerly-Catholicbut-now-semisecular-and-romantically-inclined-quasi-Daoist-religion-

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professor-from-the-North squeamishness about such overly voluble public enunciations of religious conviction. Nodding self-consciously, I put forward a bravely smiling facial mask. I did my best to honor the integrity of Beverly’s prayer. At the same time, it dawned on me that Beverly was probably convinced that as a religion professor I had to be the academic equivalent of a Christian preacher, chaplain, or minister of God. This was not, however, the appropriate time to try to explain the differences between Christian-Evangelical theological convictions and ministry and the broadly secular-cultural academic beliefs and tribal practices of comparative religion professors. I suppose also that I did not try to clarify these distinctions because, as a matter of fact, there are many versions of secular academic faith—even some variations that might be called types of spiritual humanism. Moreover, I knew enough about the history of Christianity to know that Southern Evangelical Protestantism was never monolithic in belief or practice. For all my apprehension about letting Beverly think I was a simple Christian believer, I could honestly say that I appreciated the emotional power and healing significance of her prayerful declaration. Whatever it meant to experience the gooseflesh presence of “spirit” or “Holy Ghost feelin’s,” this felt like the real thing—at least as real as the Diet Coke Beverly was drinking. On the other hand, whatever it means to be in the presence of spirit—in religious and/or secular-academic, supernatural, or more naturalistic-cognitive-evolutionary terms—is obviously not an easy matter. It touches upon some of the core issues connected with Finster’s form of visionary experience and artistic practice. Was all of this really religious, psychological, theatrical, or some combination? Is it all just imaginary? The “it” in this case being God, the gods, the Holy Ghost, or some other spiritual, supernatural, or paranormal entity. We should recall that once, when confronted with a particularly aggressive interviewer, Finster loudly declared, “It ain’t my imagination!” He went on even more vociferously to say that “you people” (meaning the interviewer as well as, more generally, writers, reporters, city folk, and most certainly professors) are “always writing about my imagination.” All these city folk ever said, he protested, was that “I got good imagination!” Righteously angry at this point (and with “spittle and specks of Raisin Bran” spraying across the room), he hollered, “It makes me sick! I tell them that what I get comes from another world. It comes from God!”15 The sincerity of this outburst is not in question, but it is also true that when run-of-the-mill secularists go for the “it’s all just

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imaginary” putdown, we are dealing with a form of naturalistic dogmatism that is often as rigid as any evangelical preacher’s convictions. A better approach, and one that I am trying to follow here, is simply that, in the spirit of William Blake’s visionary perspective, the “imaginary” aspect of such experiences need not necessarily be reductionistic or less than fully uncanny and real. How best to confront such questions while at the same time avoiding either feigned acquiescence or flippant skepticism? Given the increased confusions about human consciousness and other possible paranormal “ghosts in the machine” in the increasingly reenchanted post-postmodernist sense of things in the academy, such matters are more or less up for grabs. So here I was, sitting in a Summerville restaurant having a very good BLT sandwich and an unsweetened iced tea with a religiously impassioned Beverly Finster. I did not break into a cold sweat, but I was feeling some creeping trepidation about what was to come. After Beverly’s initial testimony, she composed herself and proceeded to ask me about my erstwhile book and how she might be able to help. Relieved that we had moved away from the public display of piety, I mentioned the need to get written permission to quote from my many recorded interviews with Howard and the family and to make use of images of his artworks and other materials. At this point, that glint of religious fervor reappeared in Beverly’s eyes. Again looking directly at me, she said she really had to tell me about some special dreams she had been having. In fact, she had had one of these dreams the previous night. I nervously gestured for her to go on, not at all knowing what to expect.

my mission should i choose to accept it Beverly said that the previous evening, and several other times since she had come back to Jesus, she had had extraordinarily vivid dreams of Howard on a heavenly planet. After beckoning to her and giving her his blessing, he had told her that he wanted his mission to continue. Everyone must help, he said, to get the messages from God out to the world. She took my hands again and said that Howard especially wanted me to carry forward his mission in my book. Then she whispered across the table: “He wants you to do it. He’s chosen you. And I know you’ll do it.” I don’t remember my exact response at that point, but it no doubt involved increased nodding, some deferential hemming and hawing, and a hesitant declaration that what she had just said was all very

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“interesting” and “amazing.” I know that I did feel anxious at Beverly’s revelation while at the same time thinking something like: “Why me, O Lord?” John F. Turner has pointed out that Finster was always looking for those willing to promote and market his prophetic mission. Indeed in a text scrawled on one of his early paintings (Visions of Planets Beyond the Light of the Sun, 1978, no. 1093), Finster declared that “blessed is he” who would “write a book” about his paintings, his “Bible facts” and visions. He linked this writer’s commission to what had become a key biblical proof text for him—that is, Hosea 12:10, concerning prophets who “multiplied visions” and made use of “similitudes.” He was, in his own words, the “Minister of simultitudes of prophets.” His visions, his Garden, and his artworks were all new similitudes or templates of the biblical images and stories.16 Turner’s book in 1989 consequently represented an extension of Finster’s mission, and perhaps my book would continue to promulgate his visionary message in the twenty-first century. In this sense, Beverly knew exactly what she was doing when she startled me with her father’s dreamy charge from beyond the grave. This was clearly a commission to produce a book that, very much in Howard Finster’s prophetic spirit, had both religious and commercial significance for the Finster family. Beverly said no more about this unnerving heavenly commission and happily went back to discussing family matters and other issues connected with restoring Paradise Garden. Collecting myself, I gratefully entered back into this more prosaic flow of familial gossip. Then as we were finishing up with our lunch, Beverly suddenly leaned toward me to say that there was one other thing she had to tell me. Bracing myself on hearing this, I looked straight ahead. She said that she wanted me to have something and she knew that Howard also wanted me to have it. I could use it for my book and no one else knew about it, not even the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. On the very day that Howard Finster had died in 2001, Beverly said, she had left the hospital and gone back to the house to make sure nothing would be taken out of the bedroom in Summerville where, right up to the end, Howard had done his painting. After securing whatever artworks and other artifacts she felt were important, she realized that there were some boxes and an old steel ammunition canister tucked away under the bed. These proved to contain her father’s personal collection of his early self-made audiotapes, various taped radio interviews, and assorted old videotapes sent to him over the years. While it’s not

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accurate to call this Finster’s “secret” cache of recordings—particularly since after perusing them, I realized that most of them were previously known—it was the case that this was an intriguing time capsule of materials that he had kept literally close to his heart. Inasmuch as they largely dated to the 1980s, they would also help document an exceptionally creative period in his career as an artist. Leaving the restaurant feeling both emotionally drained and oddly exhilarated, I followed Beverly to the trunk of her car, where she produced the boxes and an old khaki-colored ammunition canister containing fifty-five audiotapes and nine videotapes. With the understanding that I would take them back to my university and have digital copies made for both of us, I promised to return them as soon as possible. Thankfully, she also agreed that I would be able to use these materials in my writing and quote freely from them. As we were getting ready to say good-bye, she slammed the trunk closed and reminded me of her dreams about Howard’s heavenly charge. Getting into the Mercedes, the last thing she said was: “Well, Norman, now you’ve got a mission.”

chapter 3

The Matter of My Mission Howard Finster’s Religious Template

Truth can never be told so much as believed. —William Blake

I [God] have also spoken by the prophets, and I have multiplied visions, and used similitudes, by the ministry of the prophets. —Hosea 10:12

I am my own T.V. picking up visions all through the night hours of darkness from thin air my pictures come in over a pattern wave beyond the light of the sun. I think some times my mind goes so far beyond the sun till I come into a twilight zone and looking afar. —Howard Finster

my calling For months after my rendezvous with Beverly in the summer of 2009, I felt increasingly anxious about her parting words. Mostly, I was spooked by the possibility that someone might actually believe I was undertaking some kind of mission sanctioned by a heavenly Finster. It was all too evangelically unnerving for this semirespectable religion professor from the North. At the same time I was also wary of the possibility that Beverly, who had a lot of her father’s talent for strategic exaggeration in the interest of selling a product, might be hyping the religious drama of her meeting with me. There was, after all, something

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to be gained from a book that made her a key figure in the posthumous Finster saga. I wanted, however, to give Beverly the benefit of the doubt, and I need to acknowledge that my own feelings were colored by a minor visionary remembrance I had while reflecting on my encounter. Whenever I hear a reference to a divinely appointed assignment, I can’t help but instantly flash back to the image of John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd in the 1970s in their loose-limbed Saturday Night Live incarnation as the Blues Brothers. The absurd wonder of their TV, and eventual movie, performance was their frantic druggy declaration—accompanied by a throbbing blues backbeat and while dressed incongruously in dark business suits and porkpie hats—that they were on a “mission from God”!1 The idea that the Blues Brothers were on a mission from God was all very funny back then. But now the problem for me was that, given what Beverly had told me and what her father stood for, the matter of some kind of religious mission was not hilarious or quickly dismissed. Over the years of my involvement with Finster and his family, I had come to recognize the largely inaccurate negative stereotyping of Finster’s roots in the distinctive southern Appalachian or upland traditions of evangelical Christianity. Self-styled sophisticates from Atlanta, Chicago, or New York displayed a special urban form of this prejudice. For as much as they admired Finster’s folksy eccentricity and raw artistic talent, they only ironically tolerated his religion as a marketable aspect of his outsiderish biography. Another fascinating example of these inclinations is seen in the bittersweet film Junebug (2005), which tells the tale of a cultured Chicago dealer in outsider art (a young Phyllis Kind perhaps) who returns to the Southern homestead of her husband’s parents to seek out and market a peculiar artist seemingly modeled on both Finster (his visionary and apocalyptic religious elements) and the famous Chicago recluse Henry Darger (his violent and sexual caricatures). The thrust of the film is, however, not a portrait of a quirky composite artist but rather a meditation on how Southern values and evangelical religion impinge upon and transform the Chicago sophisticate and her husband, revealing them as urban outsiders to the emotional truths of their own lives. The lesson they learn is suggested by the way Southern religion frames psychological development in the most basic human sense. This trait is captured by a central refrain of the film: “God loves you just the way you are, but too much to let you stay that way.”2

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a god-haunted world What was often ignored by urban sophisticates in the film and more generally—variously out of ironic presumption, an antireligious bias, or a willful ignorance of the psychological and cultural complexities of all religious traditions—was the Southern evangelical reverence for the acute contradictions of human nature, the universality of the revivalist need for a periodic re-creation/recreation of mind and body, and the strangeness of some inner spirit lodged in all external forms of flesh and matter. For all the good ole Southern boy and girl literality about the Bible, there were constant intimations of a deeper mystery about all such matters of divine guidance. God, or the incarnate Son Jesus, certainly spoke to his people, but often with a forked tongue. A dark humor and insistent sardonic sadness always tended to temper the glad tidings.3 Among various darker predilections for regional-ethnic insularity, racial prejudice, and physical violence, Southern Evangelical Christianity was also a tradition distinctive for its nonintellectual but instinctual faith defined by heart and hearth, its joy in simple pleasures, and its practical ethics of family and regional community. Undergirding all these factors was the South’s fundamental curiosity about, and tolerance of, human frailty and eccentricity. As one of the Finster children told John F. Turner in the 1980s, Finster’s eccentricity was nothing special in the Summerville area. To get noticed there you really had to have killed someone.4 Moreover, Finster’s peculiarities were hardly remarkable when just down the road the reclusive James Billie Lemming lived in a red-white-and-blue-painted log cabin and a similarly painted surrounding forest. Every morning he energized himself by sticking a metal fork inside a 110-volt electrical outlet. In keeping with the Summerville tradition of shooting and notoriety, Lemming eventually blew his brains out.5 In other words, Finster was not extraordinarily eccentric in Chattooga County, Georgia—then as today one of the poorest, most evangelically religious, and interestingly distinctive places in Georgia. There are no bars in Summerville, but plenty of illegal homemade white-lighting liquor. And there are big and little Baptist, Methodist, and Holiness churches everywhere. Most of all, the acceptance of eccentricity and the contradictory interplay of joy and sorrow, of religious compassion and sporadic violence, was complemented by the crucial role of a crafty resourcefulness and self-reliance in all aspects of religion and life.6 Truth be told, there was

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also a grudging respect for someone who had the preacher or snake-oil salesman’s gift for sweet-talking folks into either salvation or perdition. The highland tradition of the American South, as noted by one perceptive commentator on Finster, was an all-embracing environment where “religion stops feeling like a choice, because culture is so saturated with faith it’s not something you believe, it’s just the way things are.”7 One laughs and cries when God speaks. And God is always saying something, even if it isn’t always very clear. Or what you want to hear. In Howard Finster’s neck of the woods, you really had no choice in these matters of accepting the reality of a God-drenched world, because this was a taken-for-granted truth that showed through every aspect of human joy and pain, life and death. This was also a devious truth that adhered, like grease and gristle to muscle and bone, to even the sinfilled, flawed human condition. The affirmation that was at the center of Howard Finster’s and Beverly’s lives in all its righteous transparency and sometimes deceptive theatricality was that “everything in the world is made of the same stuff and that stuff is God: the trees and the fish and the people and the boards of your porch and the bricks of your church.”8 The world itself was a wily sign of God’s very peculiar and sometimes contradictory mission on this planet. Within this religious worldview there was often the possibility that God himself primarily was, if not a foxy fellow, then a kind of trickster-deity—just as he was a monkeyfaced god in Africa or a raven-transformer in Amerindian tradition. It is well to recall that storied animals like Uncle Remus’s Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox are honored trickster figures in the American South among outsiders like slaves, African Americans, and small-town white folk. In this sense Finster, in keeping with the divinely cunning Southern worldview, might meaningfully be called crazy-clever like a trickster rabbit or fox. Tricksters throughout many traditions are like signifying shamans, prophets, and visionary artists. Spiritually akin to the Holy Ghost, they are betwixt and between the earth and the heavens and serve as aerial messengers between the spirit world and the human world.9 Champions of eccentricity in the Wes Anderson (by way of Roald Dahl) spirit of Fantastic Mr. Fox, tricksters are sign-bearing masters of creative subterfuge, comic mayhem, theatrical showmanship, and artistic enchantment. Although Finster was certainly foxy, he probably would have preferred to say that he was more akin to those sleek, lickety-fast, and clever cheetahs that he loved to paint. As he once put it, he loved to “run with the outlaws” of conventional society, art, and religion.10 And as grinning, bright-orange, plywood-cutout spirit-

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animals, Finster’s “cheatas” always displayed a surprisingly glib wisdom laced with a joyful, and at times impish, sense of humor.

religious nutters Finster has often been unfairly discounted as merely another Baptist Bible thumper or an addled hick with an ability to fool city slickers. Even worse has been the tendency, rooted in a simplistic stereotyping of rural Southern tradition, to view Finster’s religion as just plain crazy.11 Opinions about Finster have fluctuated over the years regarding the aesthetic quality of his art and regarding his mental health, but there has been an especially persistent antipathy toward Southern evangelical religiosity and often religion in general. As the art critic Peter Schjeldahl puts it, the taste for outsider art and encountering an “innocent genius” like Finster may draw upon a universal “yearning for proof of spontaneous connection to the real.” But the predictable problem is the “grinding letdown” when the “slavish,” mostly religious, prison-house “structures” of such artists become “unmistakable.”12 Judgments like this regarding the whole field with a wink toward Finster have also been voiced by the American poet laureate (from 2008 to 2010), Kay Ryan, in her poem “Outsider Art” (2010). It opens by noting, “Most of it [outsider art] is too dreary / or too cherry red.” This is a dreariness that is connected with Ryan’s observation that so much of this art, whether paintings or on chairs, is “covered with things / the Savior said / or should have said.” Moreover, “there never seems to be a surface equal / to the needs of these people.” In the end, the initial charm is replaced by disillusionment: “We are not pleased the way we thought / we would be pleased.”13 There is, I must admit, some accuracy in these comments. Even more pointed are the views of the outspoken cultural critic Terry Castle, who picks up on Ryan’s “dislike of outsider art in which a religious theme is central.” As Castle says, there’s “a lot of it out there, especially in the South and the Bible Belt.” As examples, Castle refers to the usually “repulsive” Finster and Sister Gertrude Morgan, whose work involves, in Castle’s words, “apocalyptic visions of Jesus and the Angels, inevitably decorated with fanatical scrawlings from Scripture, the whole grisly, Sado-Masochistic baptized-in-the-Blood-of-the-Lamb thing.” First of all, Finster’s and Morgan’s religious visions are not actually all that similar, and neither one is particularly grisly or bloody in the Mel Gibson/Oberammergau sadomasochistic conservative Catholic Passion of the Christ sense. Furthermore Finster’s earlier damnations

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were ultimately ameliorated by his more communitarian World’s Folk Art Church vision of collaborative salvational artwork. It seems more telling to notice that Castle’s feelings refer less to her awareness of either Finster’s or Morgan’s art than they do to her own admitted predisposition to a kind of “blaspheming” latter-day Enlightenment anti- or areligious sensibility. In fact, while she seems unaware of Finster’s own selfstyled status as the Stranger from Another World, Castle declares that her extreme difficulty with this kind of art is that “ ‘religious’ outsiders” are “strangers to the nth degree” (her emphasis). They are basically just “religious nutters”—a remark that puts her back in the hardly defensible position that one must be crazy to be religious.14 Most interesting is the cognitive dissonance of Castle’s rejection of what she calls the religious nutters’ obsessively repulsive concern for all that “Sado-Masochistic baptized-in-the-Blood” sort of thing. Right after branding Finster with such an inclination, Castle parenthetically notes the paradox of her own position on these sadomasochistic matters as she reluctantly admits that she doesn’t really mind this kind of “frightful stuff in the [Henry] Darger oeuvre.” Very curious, or as the Cheshire cat would say, “curiouser and curiouser.” But how is it that Darger as a Roman Catholic recluse with a bloody fixation on strangling cartoonish little girls who had penises can be loved by trendy critics, whereas Finster must ultimately be found religiously abhorrent? Neither Darger nor Finster was fashionably ironic when it came to religion, although Finster’s evangelical religiosity as tempered by his art was certainly less bloody and more fully and eclectically inclusive than Darger’s Catholicism. But both were gloriously eccentric. Castle concludes her discussion of religious outsiders like Finster with a larger indictment of the whole outsider field running from art-brutish mentally disabled artists (just nutters, that is, not the more repellent religious nutters) to almost every other variant of self-taught artist cut off in some fashion from mainstream art and culture. Her disappointment is that, like Kay Ryan, she came to feel that this art unfortunately “doesn’t wear well.”15 The difficulty is that, aside from her initial enthusiastic reaction to an art that seemed so refreshingly removed from the concerns and “metaphysical anxiety” of the conventional art world, she gradually recognized “after a certain amount of contemplation” the lack of any layered “meaning” in such works. Such art is in the final analysis a “meaning suck,” as she so delicately puts it. “One tires of it,” Castle declares, since “a certain depth-effect comes to seem lacking.” After a while one even finds oneself “turning to Andy

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Warhol or (gulp) Tracey Emin with a certain relief.” It is the parenthetical “gulp” which suggests that the meaning issue is (just perhaps) more Castle’s academic deficiency than necessarily a problem found in the work of all outsider artists, whether religious nutters or something more profane. I do not deny that there are plenty of examples of cutesy and sucky outsider art (some of which may be attributed to Finster), or that one may have deflated second thoughts about certain artists. I admit to having such qualms myself at times. But to suggest that these disappointments and reassessments represent a “meaning suck” more profound than what is often seen in the work of especially hip mainstreamers like Emin, Damien Hirst, or Cy Twombly is, to say the least, archly disingenuous. There’s always plenty of meaning suck to go around in art circles high and low. As I hope I demonstrate throughout this work, there is plenty of meaning to go around in both Finster’s and Darger’s art. Meaning is like myth and a good story: it is a construct that always has to do with what we make of it. How it leads to other stories. How it is received by different audiences who give it meaning (even when nothing’s there). And as Kay Ryan would say about outsider art: “It even wraps around the backs of things / and under arms.”16 Yes, the meaning of Finster’s religious signage wraps around and under things in a way that goes beyond Schjeldahl’s “prison house” of religious dogma or Castle’s accusations of meaningless religious dementia. But these are not easy matters; and as some would say, there’s an intrinsic psychotic linkage between visionary ecstasy and artistic creativity. These issues of a holy or visionary madness are thoughtfully discussed by an essayist and cultural critic of the South, Greg Bottoms.17 Particularly poignant are Bottoms’s sensitive reflections on Finster’s obsessive behavior, “sleeplessness,” and visionary “hallucinations” as a diagnosable form of psychotic “mania.” Quoting the historian of art and insanity John MacGregor, Bottoms notes that “an artist is a man who creates a parallel universe, who doesn’t want an imposed universe inflicted on him.” And that is the very “definition of insanity.” To his credit, Bottoms moderates his very personal views about these difficult problems (his schizophrenic brother committed suicide) at the very end of his book in the course of an extended conversation with the filmmaker David Fetcho. Fetcho had spent years working on a feature-length documentary film about Finster, and Bottoms was not afraid to press Fetcho on the question of Finster’s sanity.18 Fetcho comes across as being uncomfortable with the issue but concludes that whether or not some contemporary

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psychologists might consider Finster “somewhat mad,” there was a greater meaning to Finster’s life and art. It was simply that, given all the suffering in the world and in Finster’s own life, he was able to come through it all and creatively make it into something positively transformative for himself and others. Finster was able to “live as a truly free and peaceful person,” and by so doing—because of his passion, his visionary faith, and his art—he showed us that we “should be able to also.” Finster had healed himself to show the rest of us a healing path through the garden of life. Bottoms himself is a creatively attuned writer who seems always to be hinting at a deeper meaning in the life and work of Finster, whom he sees as the most passionately driven of the outsider artists. This deeper meaning is the mythic truth that these artists can force us to question the ordinary ways we judge madness and sanity, the ways we evaluate religious ecstasy, psychotic mania, and artistic creativity. From this perspective, religion, art, and psychosis all in different functional and dysfunctional ways share a common not-always-successful concern with healing the fractured human condition. Finster was unquestionably crazy-clever like a crafty fox. Indeed he was an especially driven evangelical trickster who, like Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, and Br’er Cheetah (while making birdcalls and playing banjo), was always full of new visions and new stories that at their best help us confront the serpents let loose in paradise. The poet Allen Ginsberg puts forward a different, nuanced opinion about these interconnected matters of psychosis, religious ecstasy, and artistic creativity. Ginsberg started out thinking that Finster might have been “nuts” but finally decided, after meeting him and seeing his work in New York in 1989, that he was something of a poet as much as a visual artist. Above all, he was “a supreme neurotic genius.” This seems to be a step down from the category of “supreme visionary” (which Ginsburg considered William Blake, and probably himself, to be); but as Ginsberg admitted, that “isn’t so bad.”19 What Ginsberg perhaps meant to say is that there is doubtlessly a bit of the religiously neurotic trickster in Howard Finster, a diagnosis that certainly applies to Ginsberg and Blake as much as to Finster. Indeed, Ginsberg actually emphasized the visionary and poetic affinities between Blake and Finster. All three of them functioned quite well in society, although they loved to playfully and creatively stretch the boundaries of acceptable behavior. The fact is that the category of trickster mythology often seems to apply to the most supremely neurotic religious and artistic visionaries throughout world history.20

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crying with elvis All these conflicting thoughts about religious nutters, healing shamans, visionary tricksters and neurotic artists indicate that my decision to write about Finster was not a simple matter. It definitely was not an issue that could be resolved with a straightforward acceptance or rejection of the religious implications of Finster’s life and art. Finster’s general religiousness was surely part of the humid Southern air he breathed. And as I was learning, this was a regional religiosity that was especially quirky and complex. At the same time, however, it seems that Finster had made some real decisions regarding his life’s special mission or missions. Thus Finster’s brash boyhood rejection of his father’s unchurched condition led to his early enthusiasm for being born again and afterward to his decision to become a preacher. Finally, in later life there was that mythic fulcrum in what had become his oft-rehearsed finger-face event of 1976. In all these critical episodes in Finster’s evolving and increasingly embellished life story, the underlying implication is that the unexpected and revelatory nature of those incidents was simultaneously an inevitable and fated aspect of his growing sense of cosmic destiny. Knowing some of the religious and psychological complexities of choice and inevitability in Finster’s evangelical feelings about his mission as God’s maverick agent was only making my struggle to write an interpretive book about Finster all the more difficult. Was this book really my decision, or was it in some curious way as spontaneously predestined, and yet as constructed, as Finster’s own sense of providence? The preordained aspect of my own story leading to this book was first suggested to me when I was leaving the Finster compound a number of months after my encounter with Beverly in 2009. I had gone down to Georgia to examine Thomas Scanlin’s extensive archive of Finster materials. Located in Dahlonega, an old mining town in the Appalachian foothills of north Georgia that had become a picturesquely affluent community and tourist destination, Scanlin’s home was relatively close to Summerville; and toward the end of my stay with him, I made a hurried trip to check up on the latest developments at the Finster household and at the Garden in Pennville. Of special interest was the opportunity to finally meet the new caretaker of Paradise Garden at that time, the Reverend Tommy Littleton, and to see for myself any destruction caused by a twister that had reportedly skipped through the Garden the day before. During this hurried visit, I was not able to see Pauline or Beverly, but I did see Allen Wilson, one of Finster’s grandchildren and an

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old acquaintance from the 1980s. While walking through the stormdamaged Garden with Littleton, I saw that, whereas the twister had uprooted trees and wreaked considerable havoc throughout the Garden, it had mercifully missed the World’s Folk Art Church. The church had been spared, but the winding path of the destructive winds made it clear that it had been a close call. The most significant outcome of this visit, however, was not so much what I heard or saw in Summerville and Pennville. Rather it was what happened while driving my rented car on an early Sunday morning back to my brother’s house outside of Atlanta. Scanning the radio dial that overcast morning when the trees had started to turn in the cool fall air, I was not at all surprised to run across numerous Sunday preachers dominating the channels. Most of these were on powerful stations in Atlanta and ran the gamut of urban black and white ministers earnestly preaching in an educated evangelical mode with a modulated middle-class sentimentality. Searching for the livelier fare of some Atlanta hip-hop, or even a NPR news program, I suddenly happened across a scratchy AM station from some small town north of Atlanta—Rome or Gainesville, perhaps—that was broadcasting a long, emotional sermon by an obviously rural and old-timey preacher with a distinctly Primitive Baptist flare. Gasping rhythmically for breath in a way that punctuated his rasping singsong voice, this preacher had an intense, mesmerizing cadence. I have no memory of the actual content of the sermon, but I vividly recall the incredible drama and passion of this man’s piercing radio voice. The preacher’s entrancing performance went on and on, and I found myself turning up the volume as I drove through the morning hours. In the midst of this reverie, which conjured throbbing images of anguish and wonder so close to the bone in the American South, I suddenly felt again the horror that had accompanied the painful and premature death of my wife back in the summer of 1998. That event had come unexpectedly right after the two of us had visited with the Finsters. Moreover, since she had had to return home to Pennsylvania by plane before I could return with the car, these memories also rekindled the deeply embedded sadness in my heart that I had not been there with her when she abruptly died. When the preaching was finally over, I put on a CD of Elvis Presley singing “Amazing Grace.” Playing this wrenching anthem over and over, I shuddered with grief as tears ran down my face. It was then that I knew I had to write something that captured some of the human, religious, and artistic truths embodied by Finster. It had become my destiny.

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During the ride back to Atlanta, I came to accept the inevitability of my need to write about Finster. Nevertheless, I was unsure at that time whether my personal conviction meant that I had also—in some unconscious fashion—actually accepted Beverly’s charge to take up her dreamt commission from heaven. Putting it this way—as a “mission from God”—still resonated too much with my remembrance of the Blues Brothers, and I reminded myself that it was not really God’s mission as channeled by Beverly that I was accepting or rejecting. It was more truthfully Finster’s public commission that he had articulated for all who could hear and see, in words, wood, paint, and performance well before his own death and Beverly’s nocturnal visions. The honest truth was that I could not accept the Christian exclusivity and the particular metaphysical intentionality of Beverly’s challenge to me in the Paradise Garden parking lot. However, I was coming more and more to affirm the betwixt-and-between status of my long involvement with Howard Finster. The saving grace of my evolving feelings about these matters was that, as much as I respected the sincerity of Beverly’s own beliefs, I felt confident in knowing that Finster’s idiosyncratic visionary practice of his religious convictions stretched the boundaries of rural Southern Evangelicalism. It was true that the freewheeling Baptist religion of the Southern highlands made allowances for go-getting nonconformists, but Finster had taken such issues to a whole new level of self-advertised weirdness. The most striking confirmation that Finster’s ways with religion, art, and life were challenging was that, in the 1980s, when he had achieved a reputation for wildly out-of-control behavior in his increasingly extravagant Paradise Garden, locals fired several drive-by gunshots at his Garden studio. They were warning him that they were not at all happy about what was going on in their neighborhood.

finster’s outer-space religion Finster strongly asserted in words and images that no one really understood him, not even his family, his neighbors, or his local community. This was especially true of those who felt compelled to take potshots at the crazy preacher man and his ever-expanding biblical junkyard called Paradise Garden and the oddly constructed World’s Folk Art Church. The church was originally a single-story Southern vernacular chapel building transformed by Finster in response to a design plan that came to him in a vision. This resulted in an extraordinary multitiered and sixteen-

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segmented architectural structure that inspired an academic monograph.21 The ensuing building looked like a lopsided wedding cake upon which a funky flying saucer with portholes—a saucer style described by George Adamski—had landed.22 Throughout Finster’s career, stylized variations on flying saucers became stereotypical in his painted depictions of the heavenly cosmos. In this sense, I think it is possible to acknowledge the larger—more ambiguous, metaphorical, comparative, and Finsterian—truth of Beverly’s charge to me. Thus Finster’s life and work cannot easily be described as some kind of typical Southern Bible Belt Fundamentalism. Southern upland religion is a regional tradition in which individualistic conviction and innovation often trump inflexible biblical belief or any kind of church authority.23 Just as Paradise Garden was far more than a run-of-the-mill religious theme park, so also was Finster’s religious-artistic sensibility largely his own visionary invention—allowing for some significant help from the Holy Ghost and the saucers. Southern Baptist tradition in general, but particularly the Appalachian denominational variations within that tradition (for example, Finster’s Free Will Baptist self-identification and other forms, such as the Primitive Baptists and Old Regular Baptists), is too protean for any kind of simple caricature.24 Denominational distinctions were often hotly contested in Southern Baptist history, and the Free Will Baptist designation in the uplands only roughly suggests broad tendencies in Finster’s religious sensibility, especially his passionate concern for individual freedom in matters of religion. As he said in an interview with Liza Kirwin of the Smithsonian Institution in 1984, he had pastored churches for more than forty-five years and he always felt constrained by the fact that “when you’re pasturing a church you have to stay within the realms of its doctrines.” He acknowledged, however, that he really “didn’t like to stay in no realms of no kind of doctrines.” His overriding principle was always that he liked “to feel free.”25 This was very much in the spirit of the characteristic pietism of Appalachian religion—that is, an individualistic emphasis on a vigorously assertive and self-reliant Christian life. Pietism in these traditions is often only a step away from a more exaggerated and aggressive prophetic or messianic vocation. Other defining traits of the Free Will tradition, such as a penchant for physical or sacramental manifestations of grace and the ritual of foot washing, were practiced erratically by Finster during his years as an active preacher and church pastor. Despite these general denominational traits, Finster was increasingly idiosyncratic in his artistic visionary spin on religious practices and doc-

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trines. This is striking in his evolving views on various theological theories about certain historical periods (stages or “dispensations”) leading to the apocalyptic Second Coming of Christ. The outer-space embellishments of Finster’s story as God’s prophetic stranger from the sky started to engulf the Abrahamic images. This is, then, a situation of visionary expansion and mythic elaboration that suggests the label of “shamanistic Christianity” for Finster’s final transformations of his evangelical heritage. For all his huffing and puffing, proclaiming, and painting about the prophesied last days during the first part of his artistic career, Finster was not a rapture-and-tribulation dispensational premillennialist in the best-selling “left behind” sense that predicts the imminent coming of Armageddon followed in rapid succession by the Antichrist and tribulation, the special raptured elevation of a holy elect, and the reappearance of triumphant Christ on earth.26 While the various pre- and postmillennialist strains of evangelical apocalypticism had become baroquely complicated toward the end of the twentieth century, Finster tended to soar above these squabbles and personally espouse his own brand of amillennialism, which tended to interpret the thousand-year period of the millennium not at all literally. For Finster it referred symbolically to the already-emergent saving spirituality of Christ’s reign on earth. Even Finster’s arrival on earth was part of that vanguard of the Second Coming. Finster clearly believed that the ultimate stranger, Jesus the Christ, saved all humankind, but that the compassionate truth of Christ’s salvation was that he was an all-loving superhuman visitor from another planet who fully embraced everyone and everything. For Finster, as a visionary and a painter of sacred art, Jesus appears to us not only as the stereotypical white Protestant savior with a neatly trimmed vandyke beard, as styled in popular paintings by Warner Sallman, but more iconically and comically as a great big old pink cutout Jesus from some celestial planet beyond the sun, as seen in The Way of Jesus (plate 3).27 Even better is that this Jesus sports cupid lips and mascaraed eyes, and his ham-hock hand and sausage fingers point stiffly downward toward a benighted earth caught up in the damnable “Way of the World,” as labeled on Finster’s painting.

god’s symbologist As a self-advertised prophet from outer space, Finster was simply beyond any kind of normal denominational constraints. Never a full-blown

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Pentecostalist or Holiness evangelical, Finster generally avoided traditional charismatic manifestations of the Holy Ghost (such as speaking in tongues, or glossolalia; healing by the laying on of hands; and most dramatically, snake handling).28 On the other hand, he was truly open to his own form of Holy Ghost phenomena in the form of hallucinatory visions, prophecy, a “grapholalia” of written words, and a particularly cryptic “unknown language,” or secret script, that would sometimes appear on his artwork. Particularly important with regard to Finster’s freely interpreted strain of regional Baptist religiosity is the recognition that he cannot be considered a fundamentalist Christian in the usual historical sense of that descriptive category.29 Finster’s need to submit literally to some prescribed set of fundamental, or irreducible, biblical doctrines and theological beliefs was usually overwhelmed by his own emergent story as an extraterrestrial signpainter given divine license to blaze a new artistic trail to God. As a kind of artistic variation on the oral tradition of Pentecostal glossolalia, Finster the artist developed his own graphic unknown language—a special version of his more typical grapholalia seen scribbled all over his artworks. These curious marks, or glyphs, were ostensibly his spontaneous channeling, or automatic writing, of some secret divine script. The scriptural context for this unknown language and its associations with prophecy are found in 1 Corinthians 14, where the language of prophecy is privileged over speaking in tongues. The example of the secret script seen in figure 9 was supplied by John F. Turner, who on October 27, 1989, at 3 a.m. (“past midnight”) questioned Finster about his “unknown language” and then watched him quickly write out a whole page of odd symbols in a seemingly spontaneous manner. In keeping with more naturalistic theories, I suggest here only that such apparently automatic speech or writing may be partly a kind of learned behavior, in which the speaker or writer picks up on and semiconsciously reproduces some fragmented elements of sounds or images experienced elsewhere. There are, for example, some other versions of Finster’s unknown language script that seem like vaguely remembered distortions of Chinese characters. Given the prevalence of Masonic Lodge culture in the South, it could also be that he had been exposed to some of the secret scripts used in different degrees of Masonic initiation.30 At the same time, however, there have been hints that this curious symbology was simply another prop in Finster’s growing mythic repertoire. Or perhaps something from his showman’s bag of tricks. In the 1980s he was always playing with the infinite possibilities of lines and scripts. The

figure 9. Howard Finster, To John Turner from Howard Finstr (the unknown language), 1989. Marker on paper, 15 x 9.5 inches. John F. Turner Collection. Photograph by Steven Lichak. © John F. Turner.

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truth probably lies somewhere between an involuntary occurrence in the grand surrealistic and mediumistic traditions of automatic writing and a goal-directed action.31 Regardless, what Finster’s unknown language really reveals (given the graphic variations seen on different works) is his incredible inventiveness, his versatility as a graphic artist, and his appreciation of the real mystery of similitudes and symbols. What seems evident is that Finster, although he believed many conventional scriptural pieties, was not a straightforward fundamentalist who felt bound to accept only the most literal understanding of the Bible. As art and his progressively otherworldly visions became his preferred way to communicate, interpret, and market God’s messages to humankind, he became more and more what might be called a Baptist symbolist, semiotician, or more popularly, in reference to a fictitious profession that figures in The Da Vinci Code, a “symbologist.” From the 1960s onward, he primarily relied on his visions, as well as his media savvy, to discern the hidden meanings, images, patterns, dimensions, codes, or signs that went beyond the literal and chronological particularity of individual words and history. Finster was free to be, as he once memorably put it, his “own T.V.”32 Always pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable to broadcast on either network or cable television, he was ultimately an outsider religionist as well as an outsider artist. The incongruity of this is that the incorrectly perceived quaintness of Finster’s religion was too often taken by city folk and collectors as the fundamental guarantor of Finster’s authenticity as an outsider artist. What is needed is not simply an interpretation of his myriad sacred paintings as messages, but a realization that Finster himself, his religious visions, and his overall mythic life were the most meaningful signs of his own symbolic truth. And this is a truth that goes beyond any narrow understanding of evangelical Christianity. Howard Finster’s zany art and extraterrestrial theology were akin to the religious vision expressed in the odd stories of Southern gothic Catholicism by Flannery O’Connor—and perhaps also in aspects of William Faulkner’s maverick evocation of the religious sound and fury of Southern life.33 Like Finster, O’Connor was a gifted and wounded stranger visiting this earth planet to practice a written-down and imagined art of signs and wonders—a visionary perspective and practice that affirmed the symbolic and sacramental nature of the material world. This was an affirmation that extended even to the most lowly and at times grotesque incarnations of all worldly things, human or otherwise.

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To invoke a phrase that O’Connor borrowed from Teilhard de Chardin, “Everything that rises must converge.” It can be said that in both O’Connor’s and Finster’s work, there is a necessary convergence of religious and aesthetic communication in the symbolic nature of God’s world and in the symbolic expressiveness of art.34 In visionary experience or artistic creation, religion and art are conjoined in the work of allowing others to see and feel the saving power found in the mysteries of matter and human life. Religion and art are both deeply rooted in human nature. And like wisteria run rampant, religion and art in cultural prehistory and history are constantly shooting out tendrils that are inextricably intertwined and twisted. Finster never damned those who didn’t share his own particular version of the Christian story. He did, of course, condemn sin and infidelity, but not individual sinners or infidels. In his expansive use of these categories, the first one (sinners) referred generally to everyone of whatever religion, culture, or ethnicity; and the other (infidels) tended to mean anyone who failed to respond to the symbolic and spiritual nature of reality. Finster’s love was not premised on an absolute need for others to accept the Christian particularity and biblical literality of the artwork, although Finster would certainly have liked such an affirmation. As it was for those who loved Flannery O’Connor’s mordant stories without accepting the peculiar Southern-style Catholicism, so was it for the secular urban folk who visited Paradise Garden or were elsewhere fascinated with the weird Finster artwork. These were the fans who mostly believed—consciously, reservedly, or otherwise—in Finster the authentic country visionary, jack-of-all-trades artist, or mesmerizing mythmaker. Both the artistic production and the personal performance were amazing, as was Finster’s charismatic ability to sell you on the wonder of what he had wrought by his sleepless labors. Many of these Finster admirers were never particularly enamored of the Southern evangelical style of religion. Nevertheless, this is not to deny that there was something implicitly religious about their fascination with Finster and their need to find something extraordinarily meaningful in him. For many—and I can attest to having this feeling early on in my acquaintance with him—Finster was surely a powerful sign of something. But it was extremely difficult to know what the deeper and more universal meaning was. By admitting this, I do not wish to diminish the genuineness of Finster’s faith or the profundity of Christian tradition. But I do want to tell the truth about my own faith in these matters, a position that also

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reflects the feelings of many others who fell under the spell of Finster’s story. So if I must own up to either affirming or denying the mission Beverly pointedly revealed to me one hot summer day in Georgia, I will say only that what I have tried to do here is to take seriously the real challenge of that encounter. I take Beverly’s dream and commission as a signal of an even more comprehensive possibility—that is, the coming together of the sincere and the disingenuous, the serious and the funny, the unusual and the mundane, and the religious and the artistic truth. This is the possibility—or probability, according to the Roman Catholic O’Connor, the nominally Protestant Faulkner, and the Free Will Baptist Finster—that everything that rises will finally converge, albeit in strange and unexpected ways. As Faulkner noted, “No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or crescent or whatever—that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.”35 I cannot say that my response to Beverly is in any way divinely ordained, but it does clearly depend on my duty to the muse of my own imagination.

using similitudes From the very beginning of his life, Finster thought and acted in relation to his crafty and resourceful work with the wooden grain, oral rhythm, rhyme scheme, narrative schemata, graphic pattern, and material structure of things. The jig and template of everything. This was what he called the only partly visible true “emage”/image, schematic likeness, “demention”/dimension, template, stencil, structure, or symbolic prototype of things and persons (see figure 10).36 These “dementions” could also metaphorically be called the inner armature, skeletal outline, seminal principle, stem cell, DNA helix, or germinal matrix that in the process of time allowed for the creative replication and rebirth of wholly new and fully visible material entities. These symbolic forms were the basis for Finster’s conviction that it was the image as template that embryonically carried the message of the whole. Typically, this insight for Finster was grounded in biblical stories of the Lord God and his agents on earth, who communicated their visionary experience through signs and “similitudes.” As the biblical book of Hosea the prophet says, “I [God] have also spoken by the prophets, and I have multiplied visions, and used similitudes, by the ministry of the prophets” (Hosea 10:12). This

figure 10. Howard Finster, Image/Emage of Elvis at 3 Yrs., c. 1980s. Cutout of a cardboard stencil/template/dimension, 7.5 x 5.25 inches. © Thomas E. Scanlin Collection.

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passage was truly taken to heart by Finster, a self-styled prophet who multiplied his visions by using his cutout similitudes to produce thousands of painted signs, pictures, and messages from God. For Finster, this passion for pattern is what it meant to truly know something or someone. It depended on one’s ability to read the signifying nature of things. Knowing in this intuitive or primal way has much to do with seeing the hidden image and hearing the true story or myth of things as related to their creative beginnings and their apocalyptic end-time. The oak tree is already present in the acorn as a kind of sign or image of what will come. Becoming materially real, an independent thing, depends on a transformational and morphological process that proceeds from what was originally present only in a seedlike, larval, or imaginal condition. Matter consequently depends on metamorphosis: the mythic or imaginative process of creating something out of no-thing in particular—the original image or template of each individual thing or artwork present in the seed. Finster would obviously not have used such romantically philosophical terminology for his pursuit of patterns. For him, it was definitively told of in the Bible and communicated to him through his hands and the “seven invisible members of the Holy Ghost.” Nevertheless, it is possible to expand on his preferred Christian idiom of prophetic signs and similitudes in a more universally mythic and philosophically existential way. From Finster’s visionary Christian perspective of the mercurial Holy Ghost, who symbolically functions as a kind of trickster-transformer or messenger spirit, this means there is a constant need for the revival, replication, and reproduction of all persons and things in the face of their inevitable decay, depletion, depression, and death. Morally and evangelically, this refers to every person’s constant slippage into a sinful condition.37 In Finster’s later career as a sacred artist, he called his two- and threedimensional templates, or similitudes—which captured the inner spirit and structure of his visionary sights and their narrative content—his specially prepared artistic “dementions” (dimensions), patterns, or stencils. The dimensions themselves were mostly stencils traced from photographs, advertisements, and magazines or based on some original sketch he did for one of his cutouts. They were in the vein of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened and cribbed commercial images from popular magazines and photographs. Even more prosaically, these very practical “dementions” were Finster’s many hand-prepared paper, cardboard, and plywood stencils that schematically defined a prototypical image used imaginatively to create many multiple pictures of almost anything—Finster’s

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own visage, family members, friends, collectors, multicolored angels, baby Elvis, George Washington, cheetahs, Coca-Cola bottles, and so on. Like the iconic schemes of Orthodox Christian paintings of saints, these patterns helped Finster make his visions visible for others. In their utter simplicity, and when imaginatively rendered in paint, they could even capture the skeletal spirit, holy image, or inner similitude of things, persons, or saints. Icon in Orthodox Christian tradition means “image, symbol, or archetype” (of Jesus, a saint, or another holy personage) and is most ordinarily a flat, highly stylized and schematic painting with bright, unnatural colors. A good icon is not realistic in terms of its representation but is a rendition of the spiritual or inner truth of a holy person. An icon, then, is not a mimetic reproduction of the visible world but a sign system of graphic symbols intended to convey a saving invisible message.38 An interesting illustration of this principle is seen in one of Finster’s very early painted portraits of a step-grandson, Brian Scott (plate 4).39 Extremely minimal and schematic, to the point where some might say it is rudely cartoonish, this image has an obscure iconic power that captures something truly poignant, plaintive, and earnestly meaningful about the subject of the painting and about Finster’s own selfdiscovered abilities as God’s iconic-sign painter. According to Finster, it all came down to taking “a fellow’s hairstyle and his nose, mouth, and chin, and you pretty well got it.” In this way, Finster created a “template, which he call[ed] a ‘dimension.’ ”40 When we think back to Finster’s discoveries as a craftsman working with the grain of wood, the patina of metal, the found images in immiscible liquids, and most anything else, and to his learning how to prepare a pattern or die to make many imaginatively varied copies of successful designs, we can see that the recycling of these artistic “dementions” was at the very heart of his creative process for mass-produced and marketable works made of wood (clocks, furniture, toys) and for his twodimensional artwork. This is particularly true for the tens of thousands of his “multiples” (his plywood cutouts, stenciled paintings, and even his picture frames stamped with his own hand-cut metal die).41 While his stencils were the key to Finster’s amazing artistic productivity and commercial profitability, he was always prepared to freely share these patterns with anyone who cared to try out their own skill as a divine craftsman and sign painter. Finster’s talent for seeing a generative matrix, even when it was invisible or a confused swirl of an image on the surface, was at the core of his ability to see the value in what others had thrown away. As “God’s garbage collector” in his Paradise Garden, he

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intuitively knew the importance of rotted organic matter in the preparation of a hidden seedbed of regeneration. This awareness when applied to all the flora and fauna of God’s green earth prompted Finster’s lifelong devotion to the creative reclamation of the junk of the world.

passion for pattern Finster’s commitment to the power of pattern is the key to other vital aspects of his religious and aesthetic activities. This is dramatically apparent in his pronounced eidetic vision, honed throughout his life, or more precisely his pareidolia—that is, his facility for seeing “faces” in the clouds or in anything else with a murky grain or cloudy texture (see figure 11).42 This ability to see that the initial chaos of experience can disclose something meaningful like a face or figurative pattern can be partly explained in terms of human evolutionary adaptability and Rorschach projection. And it is also true that in contemporary chaos theory there are hidden dimensions of incredible fractal, and horror vacui, beauty that can be mathematically revealed as visual patterns having almost a visionary aura.43 But for a religious visionary and showman like Howard Finster, as it was for other famous artist-visionaries, like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, this ability to see faces embedded in the swirling chaos of matter was simultaneously cognitive, instinctual, and revelatory. Interestingly enough this same kind of awareness was operative in the vision and artwork of the founder of art brut, Jean Dubuffet, as seen in his Rorschach-blot ink paintings and assemblages. Whereas Finster concerned himself with finding hidden patterns or dimensions, Dubuffet focused on the infinitely replicable “generalities” or “archetypes” of images. Dubuffet “wanted to dig out the profound inner being” of things. As he proclaimed, “When I’m painting I prefer to avoid the one-off; I prefer painting generalities. If I paint a sunken lane, I want it to be an archetype of all such things, a quintessence of all the sunken lanes in the world, and if I paint a human face, I’m quite happy for my painting just to suggest a human face, but without specific features, which are pointless.”44 For all these visionary artists, as well as for many of the surrealists and spiritualists, the intuitive talent for seeing the spiritual pattern or structural “face” hidden both on and within the surface of things primarily referred to the special religious and aesthetic ability to view reality as always visually metaphoric, inherently figurative/anthropomorphic, and suggestively storied.

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figure 11. Howard Finster, Cloud portfolio (cloud-picture contact sheet), 1986. Finster’s hand-drawn faces on gelatin silver print photographs by Patti Boustany, 8 x 10 inches. Lehigh University Art Galleries Collection. Photograph by Robert Walch. © Lehigh University Art Galleries.

From this perspective, the human perception of the world is suffused with signs of something glimpsed in the infinitely pliable matter of clouds, ink, timber, cement, metal, and paint. If only it can be seen. With a little help from wily shamans, prophets, saints, and artists, these signs are often communicated as a kind of x-ray image of the skeleton within the body. Within the shamanistic tradition of “x-ray-style” art, this is the more permanent and archetypal anatomical spirit-structure, or schematic “emage,” of things that persists after death.45 An artist like Finster is in this way fundamentally akin to a skilled virtuoso of inner vision,

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able to communicate significant patterns of language, image, and action to those less linguistically, visually, and behaviorally astute.

finster’s religious template While grinning and strumming his banjo, Howard Finster would declare that his Appalachian and Baptist traditions were trying to tell us something important about the world and human life. But you gotta listen and look real hard. Read the signs! Behold the art! Listen to the stories! Look behind and through the surface of things or, still better, look to what a puffy cloud, mottled image, painted surface, or human face can signal. So with regard to Finster’s numerous stenciled cutouts, you’ll need to see the image on the front, read the words on the back, and sensually appreciate the redeemed quality of the scrap plywood and leftover tractor enamel. Seeking to understand Finster and his artwork does not mean that one has to speak the Baptist vernacular. Better to decipher Finster’s grapholalia. And one does not even need to be fully aware of the stories from the Bible. Listen to the stories and view the art in your own way, but be open to how and what is both explicitly and implicitly being said. There are broad human meanings as much as any literal, explicit evangelical message. All these works, after all, share a common visionary source and mythic medium, armature, narrative, structure, or dimension. As Finster might say, that’s just the way it is when the Holy Ghost helps you see the inner pattern and hidden narrative of things. Southern highlands religiosity embraces various dynamic forms of evangelical tradition, which collectively run as a counterstream alongside many aspects of the conventional church history of American Protestant Christianity. In like manner, the visionary art that started to pour forth during the last quarter of Finster’s life also challenged many dogmatic assumptions of Bible Belt Fundamentalism and mainstream art history. The totality of Finster’s work puts forward both overt and covert religious messages. Many of these were explicit biblical dispatches, but there were all sorts of other hidden and more universal spiritual messages transmitted by a veritable unknown language revealed by the grain of the wood, the flow of the paint, the pattern of the images, the rhythm of the words, the faces in the clouds, the signs in the Garden, and the UFOs and angels hovering everywhere. Finster’s embodiment of the richly variegated highland regional tradition of religion generally upheld the sacred dignity of human nature, the

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sanctity of family tradition, the haunted reality of a spirit-filled world, the importance of ecstatic born-again experience, the possibility of regenerative healing in the face of human sinfulness, the morality of respect and love, and a reap-what-you-sow sense of destiny. Another trait valorized by Southern and Appalachian culture—as many Southern writers, like Harry Crews, William Faulkner, and the gothic Catholic storyteller Flannery O’Connor, knew so well—is this tradition’s profound respect for the oddness of the human condition, along with all its contradictory combinations of hound dogs and water moccasins, spirits and demons, joy and suffering, whisky and strychnine, compassion and violence, and heaven and hell.46 And even though Southern hill folk may at times take potshots at a too-showy nonconformity, there is almost always a grudging tolerance for human eccentricity. Finster may never have been a good, old-time snake handler, but he knew there are plenty of snakes to contend with in the garden of life. It was the breadth of his visionary engagement with his own life and the larger world that launched his earthbound regional faith into both inner and outer space.47

chapter 4

The First and Second Noah Howard Finster’s Ark of Myth and Meaning

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself. —William Blake

I came here as a man of visions. I was sent here as a man of visions, like a second Noah. I’m not a Noah but I’m here as a second Noah. I’m here as a red light is in the street. —Howard Finster

What is involved [in living a myth] is not a commemoration of mythical events but a reiteration of them. The protagonists of the myth are made present; one becomes their contemporary. This also implies that one is no longer living in chronological time, but . . . the Time when the event first took place. —Mircea Eliade

the second noah Howard Finster rarely tired of proclaiming his visionary vocation as the Second Noah sent to this planet to proclaim the coming destructive end of all rampant earthly corruption. In the spirit of Noah’s original mission as a prophet, Finster hoped that the crafting of a new kind of salvational message and an artistic ark would lead to the re-creation of a new earth. For Finster, the signs along the road of life, biblical and otherwise, had aligned in a way that made his actions acutely urgent and, surprisingly, made his talents as a carpenter exactly pertinent to the task. Noah’s ancient warning was reinforced by many other intermingled 94

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signs and stories from the Bible, popular culture, and extraterrestrial visions that converged in Finster’s life as God’s painter of sacred art.1 Finster’s determination in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s was probably fueled by his own sense of mortality and the need to keep the sale of his work going, as much as it was by his visionary zeal and his sense of divine destiny. There was a recognition that as the twentieth century wound down and he entered his ninth decade of life, Finster’s own body was running down. And even though, like Noah, he was sometimes mocked as overly cantankerous, obdurate, and often outrageous, Finster was determined to make the most of this countdown to the end. In his increasingly elaborate vision of things, it was clear that the cataclysmic portents of the millennial shift both recalled Noah’s ancient situation described in the Bible and forecast Finster’s own endtime. Moreover it was his sense of this special temporal convergence that ratified the insistent truth of his artistic fate. Recognizing the resonance of the Noah tale for Finster, I became more and more resolute in my own evolving mission to tell Finster’s selfconstructed story of religion and art in a way that would draw out its overall narrative armature or mythic template. At the same time, I wanted to show how Finster’s life story and his art revealed an implicit religiosity that stretched the boundaries of conventional biblical and Baptist theology. Finster had once indicated that he had actually outdone the efforts of the first Noah in marketing the dire urgency of God’s warning. As he put it, “I am having more success in a way than Noah had. The first Noah preached to the world; he didn’t get a one of them saved.”2 This declaration that he had gone beyond Noah himself was prompted by Finster’s growing sense of celebrity in the 1980s, but it was also reinforced by his faith that he had produced a new kind of sign-laden ark by joining the words and images of the Bible with his own handy patchwork of popular culture, visionary fragments, and found objects (see, for example, figure 12). Building an artwork-ark required a joinery that went beyond traditional preaching and resembled Finster’s lifelong craftsmanship as a resourceful odd-job carpenter of waste wood. From the discarded and disparate came something that had both monetary and moral value. In fact, the most striking verification of this principle in the spirit of the original Noah was Finster’s vision-guided construction of Paradise Garden and the World’s Folk Art Church, cobbled together more or less biblically out of “pitch and gopher wood” (Genesis 6:14).3 For Finster, the gopher wood that supported and framed his signs of the times was pieced

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figure 12. Howard Finster, Noah’s Ark: Ark Is Landing, 1990. Lithographic print on paper, 9.675 x 13.5 inches. (The stone was carved, but not printed, in 1986.) Artwork no. 5662. Lehigh University Art Galleries Collection. Photograph by Steven Lichak. © Finster Estate.

together not only with pitch but also with the wondrous liquid stone of embeddable concrete. For the end-time of the twentieth century, only an ark of wood and concrete would suffice. And this, for Finster, was yet another sign of his advance over the prophetic methodology of the original Noah. Aside from Finster’s own personal amillennial style of Baptist apocalypticism, his art of the end, produced throughout the 1970s and 1980s, captured the spirit of the times as seen in the uncontrollable kudzulike creep of cultural dissonance manifest in the New South of that era and in the international Cold War political climate of those years (see, for example, figure 13 in chapter 5), a lithograph of 1985 that depicts the “road of eturnety” passing between two “super powers” or apocalyptic beasts). It is worth remembering also that even some aspects of postmodernist mainstream art at that time focused on themes and images of imminent economic, technological, and environmental disaster.4 However, toward the end of Finster’s life, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the fire and brimstone of the earlier works gave way to a newly ameliorative tone. The irony of this softened sense of the

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end-time is that Finster died only a month after the terrible tragedy of 9/11, an event that triggered a new round of worldwide conspiratorial apocalypticism, both religious and secular.

the ark of myth Finster’s special visionary form of personal and artistic storytelling is helpfully understood as a performative act of mythmaking and ritualized re-creation that is at the very heart of the synergistic relationship of religion and art. It is necessary, therefore, to examine more fully the nature and significance of myth as an especially significant, and implicitly ongoing, form of storytelling, along with the related performative, artistically expressive, and ritual realization of the narrative armature. This is no easy task, since myth and things adjectively mythic are notoriously murky; and, in the case of Finster, the various myths or mythemes that made up his self-constructed narrative were surprisingly variable and constantly evolving. There is the additional problem that, in popular usage in the aftermath of the Western Enlightenment, myth tends to refer only to fictional, false, and often silly made-up fables that wither in the hot white light of reason. Myth in the modern vernacular sense is identified with manifestly imaginative or fictive tales (in the MythBusters’ sense of fairy tales, tall tales, urban legends, or what is found in other people’s scriptures), in contrast with rationally cogent, empirically verifiable, or literal truth.5 But the real issue here is that a rational “seeing is believing” often misses the artful truth that comes from a mythic emphasis on believing is seeing.6 I use the term myth here in the more technical anthropological and religion studies sense, where myth refers to a form of traditional narrative (tales of gods, heroes, and cultural transformers) that undergirds a cultural worldview. Myth in this way is foundational for the very definition of morality and meaning within a premodern or traditional culture. It also means that as the infrastructure of a cultural worldview, myth in modern civilizational cultures is often invisible and taken for granted. The issue is not one of scientific or literal truth but the more implicit human, cultural, symbolic, and emotional truth communicated by certain kinds of imaginative narratives and theatrical performances. Simply put, it has to do with why a novel by Jane Austen, or a play by Tom Stoppard, often says more that is truthful about the human condition than any best-selling college textbook on psychology. I also employ the term myth—and the related terminology of mythically charged

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fragments or mythemes, along with their ritual-theatrical embodiments—in preference to other, more politically correct and academically fashionable formalist, structuralist, poststructuralist, postcolonialist, and post-postmodernist abstractions. These fashionable academic movements are in turn generally associated with different kinds of discourse theory, “the social imaginary,” or, more recently and pretentiously, with the disciplinary subfield called narratology.7 Discussion about the meaning and function of mythic stories has had a long and contested history in Western tradition. Thus opinions about the nature and significance of myth have been amazingly various, running the gamut from post-Enlightenment “text critical” and historicist accounts of the mythic nature of the Bible à la Rudolf Bultmann, down to the phenomenological perspective of the comparative religionists Mircea Eliade and Wendy Doniger, the structuralist approach of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the neoromantic and heavily psychologized invocations of an archetypal monomyth of the hero in the manner of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. Other scholars, such as Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, and Bruce Lincoln, have argued that myth is fundamentally an elitist propagandistic ideological construct. In university circles these days, myth, like (it is said) the equally empty category of “religion,” finally has no significant or meaningful content aside from its conscious and unconscious use as a tool of power. Myth from this kind of perspective is a sign of nothing more than the disguised exercise of power, a coercive null set. Ritual action likewise is the repetitively practical manifestation of the manipulative adjustment, renewal, and control of social life as told of and promulgated in mythic discourse. Suffice it to say that the nature and significance of myth and ritual need not be completely hegemonic and duplicitously ideological (although myth and ritual often function that way).8 I am fundamentally talking about stories and storytelling in general and about special kinds of large, culturally formative stories called myths, which are activated by ritual behavior. Moreover these special stories or myths are especially associated with gifted, and often visionary, storyteller-performer-artists, called shamans in prehistoric and certain tribal traditions. The meaning of these special mythic tales, and of fragmentary mythemes, is a matter of the response called forth by the story and its dramatic realization in performative ritual. It involves a triple interaction: of the storyteller, the tale itself, and the audience. From this point of view, meaning is never simply uncovered or discovered as already or essentially present in a person, artwork, or narrative artifact. Rather it is a dynamic interpretive

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process involving the artist, the artwork itself, and the reception of the audience. What is vital is that the story be found engaging, existentially significant, and emotionally resonant. It should call attention to itself in the sense of a compelling dramatic arc or narrative pattern. This is a kind of common narrative plot, or what has been called the “universal grammar,” of a character/hero/protagonist facing an existential predicament and prevailing in some fashion.9 Anecdotal humor and visual imagery are also important handmaidens to this kind of story and the resolution of the predicament of human contingency. Biblically this is the mythic template of the creation of a paradisiacal human world and the resulting existential condition of fallenness. In terms of Finster’s interpretation, this involves the tragic movement from the condition of the first Adam of Eden to the second, or fallen, Adam. This primordial predicament in turn sets up the later scenario of the first Noah and the need for a second Noah, like Finster. Whatever expressive medium is employed, a myth should call for an intellectual and emotional reaction in the way that a good story or sign, or an effective advertisement, does. An intriguing illustration of this principle—in the sense of imaginatively telling a story, accompanied by an interactive linkage of iconic images and words—is the fascinating work in Understanding Comics (1993), by the comic-book artist, theorist, and graphic novelist Scott McCloud.10 And here it is important to know that Finster basically thought of himself as a cartoonist rather than a figurative artist. McCloud tells the story of comics in a way that dramatically insinuates the reader-viewer into the process of verbal and visual communication. More so than an author of a traditional academic treatise on visual communication theory, McCloud actively engages the reader in a graphically compelling and cartoonlike narrative description of how cartoon or comic meaning is constructed. Like a generic template or icon, the simplicity of cartoon imagery (especially a face) gives rise to its universality and ability to focus the attention of the observer. It touches us both visually and emotionally. In a similar way, potent iconic signage (Drink Coca-Cola! or See Rock City!), a great film, an intriguing graphic novel, or a copy of Finster’s visionary coloring book (Howard Finsters Vision of 1982) can call forth a common human response. Moreover, when cartoon imagery is coupled with the existentially generic narratives of myth, a particularly significant response is elicited. It is this response—a negotiation of the artist, object or story, and audience—that creates or mediates meaning. Meaning is not an intrinsic

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property but the variably perceived or interpreted content of a sign—the very ability to experience and respond to something or anything as significant. Meaning can be the result of our evolutionarily adaptive need to see personified patterns, to see cartoon faces in the clouds. Myth has no fixed or inherent content aside from its constantly reshuffled or telltale relation to the existential cycles of human and cosmic life. But it is this revelatory or imaginative awareness of infinite renewal and creative possibility within the cyclic flux, an affirmation of unlimited “what if” situations of persons and things, that brings meaning to our lives. Myth is, then, associated with certain memorable and malleable stories and images, told and constantly retold, recycled, reimagined, and remade from the broken pieces of different times and places. It is this that makes myth and ritual (even when largely camouflaged in modern culture) so significantly potent, so symbolically compelling, and so universally resonant for humanity past and present. Myths are stories that elicit some kind of significant response by drawing our attention, by reminding us of, and engaging us in, something only dimly and nostalgically sensed or remembered. Mythic meaning is in this way almost always open-ended when it comes to what we experience as reality. As tales of intertwined material and spiritual worlds, myths embrace and affirm a natural dimension as well as some supranatural or paranormal dimensions.11 Myth in this way is never simplistically reductionistic as an elite power narrative or naively dualistic about matter and spirit, but affirms the ambiguous mystery and polysemic meaning of matter itself and human existence. This understanding of the narrative, symbolic, existential, and artistic significance of myth and ritual is supported by recent work in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. These findings especially point to the crucial evolutionary importance of the imagination in the adaptive emergence and development of human nature and culture. In an evolutionary context, myth refers to a special kind of ubiquitous story form or cognitive template that is collectively operative in traditional or premodern cultures. But myth and various recombinant mythemes continue more implicitly, but not less significantly, in later cultural traditions down to the present. This disguised continuation is evident even in a modern and contemporary world where factually “true” stories flourish in the guise of history and science. Thus traditional mythic narratives or fragments anachronistically continue publicly as tales of the gods and humans, prophets and saints, in a pickled, literal way in the scriptures, rituals, and beliefs of organized religions. For many, however, myth in its primary symbolic as opposed to literal mold has generally been trivialized and has gone underground.

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There are numerous newly redacted, appropriated, and transformed mythemes (about, for example, gods and humans but also mutants and mystics, shamans and saints, prophets and messiahs, superheroes and monsters, UFO contactees and abductees, cult leaders and gurus, rock stars and other celebrities, and artists and entrepreneurs) that continue in the subterranean guise of popular creative art forms that make sense of our individual and collective lives. These are found variously today in novels, movies, TV, comics, computer games, graphic novels, Super Bowl advertising, and such “collective art projects” as the Elvis cult.12 This includes all the literary, visual, and performing arts—high, low, outsider, and interstitial—which explicitly and implicitly draw upon the grammar and themes of traditional tales (images and sounds), as well as all kinds of contemporary situations, to deal with issues of personal identity, existential meaning, life-cycle transitions, social-political renewal, and individual, national, environmental, and cosmic destiny. Many popular mass media and online comics, horror films and video games featuring vampires, supermen, alien abductors, X-men, and zombies, may be understood as updated versions of age-old mythic templates. The incredible popularity of such comics, graphic novels, films, and games depends, then, on their rehearsal of traditional mythic tales or mythemes reimagined and reworked for different contemporary audiences and existential situations (as shown by Jeffrey Kripal, a historian of religions, this includes, during the last half of the twentieth century, such mythemes as alienation, radiation, and mutation).13 Contemporary mythically charged stories are “once and forever” tales that ring true because they are “effective,” not because they give us “factual information.”14 One need only think of cinematic examples of this “once and forever” principle that nostalgically link ultimate origins with an intertwined past-present-future in films like Terrence Malik’s The Tree of Life, James Cameron’s Avatar and Titanic, and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. More recent, but less successful, was Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014). With studio prodding, Aronofsky sought to appeal to conservative evangelicals while at the same time awkwardly evoking some vague science-fiction elements along with the universal mythic connotations of the apocalyptic story.

myth as artistic template The beating heart of a mythic story is the question of how one returns to—albeit temporarily on this earth—the paradise garden or other

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roadside park at the Very Beginning of All Things. To return to such a place artistically and imaginatively is to be transformed or reborn, however fleetingly, and to go forward. For stories to function mythically in the contemporary world, they must stay the same by constantly, creatively, and artistically changing in response to evolving existential circumstances and revelations of cultural and personal development. The structural logic or symbolic grammar of the narrative template, plot, or armature allows for a transformative human truth of regenerative hope and renewal to be communicated by the constantly changing predicaments of life. Mythic templates are in this way intuitively responsive to an especially talented artist’s need to reenvision and retell traditional stories in a more symbolic than literal way (think, for example, of Finster’s artistic appropriation and flying-saucer embellishment of the Christian Bible); the templates also link these mythemes to tales of personal providence. Finster’s visionary linkage of the first and second Noah is a telling illustration of this principle. Mythically charged stories of self- and world-construction consequently make use of ancient narrative forms (often from scriptural traditions of major religions) but also creatively and artistically draw attention to the present with new visionary and cultural content. Finster’s personal identification with, and imaginative artistic envisioning of, various prophetic and heroic themes as sonorously recounted in the King James Version of the Christian Bible return this exceptionally influential scripture to its visionary origins in various early shamanistic-prophetic Jewish and Christian forms of illustrative storytelling and creative mythmaking.15 Finster’s visionary and graphic rendition of the Bible is not usually rigidly literal. Rather it is more revealingly symbolic and open-ended in nature. Finster’s artistic extrapolation of the Bible—his template for endlessly replicable images and new visionary content—is inherently mythic. It represents a narrative and imagistic framework for communicating human and existential truths that links contemporary events with ancient tales of dispirited depletion and destruction giving rise to revival and recreation. Consequently, the eccentrically mythic and symbolic nature of his cobbled-together artwork is finally more truthful than what some would take as the absolutely literal or fundamentalist veracity of the Bible. The meaning of Finster’s message as religious myth and visionary art is simultaneously ancient and biblical and human and universal. Most tellingly, the Bible-soaked signage-art of Finster’s cartoon images conveys a message that is inclusively tolerant and compassionately moral.

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the truth of noah’s tale To read the Jewish and Christian Bible mythically does not mean that the account of Noah and his ark is ridiculously false because it cannot be understood as an historical or factual record of an ancient flood or cosmic tsunami of retribution. Neither does its truth necessarily depend on the observation that there is obviously no way two of every animal, including dinosaurs as some creationists would have it, could fit into the ark as depicted in the Bible. This tale—a composition as found in the Hebrew scriptures that alludes to a much earlier Sumerian account seen in the story of Gilgamesh and to even earlier oral traditions—should not be taken literally as a historical document. Rather, as a significantly imaginative and patched-together narrative, it is a story that creatively, symbolically, and mythically illustrates deeply ingrained psychological and emotional truths about human wickedness, the need for a retributive response to these human actions—often in the form of some foreordained natural disaster—and the ultimate re-creation of the world through some saving agency, culture hero, shaman, prophet, patriarch, superman, or messiah. The individual facts of the story are not literally true, but it may be said that the larger “fact” of the story hinges on a substantial existential and structural truth about the human condition. And it is this human truth that is imaginatively captured and best communicated by the visionary and symbolic fiction of a mythic tale. While risking accusations of madness, Noah—and Finster saw himself in this way—is driven to communicate his portentous vision. Moreover, by virtue of his attention to the signs of the time and his amazingly clever craftsmanship, he succeeds in building a wooden vessel that can harbor two of all the creatures of the world (or, in Finster’s version, the whole Bible and the inventions of humankind). The success of Noah’s obsessive action is signified by the return of a dove with a branch that marks the reappearance of a habitable world. In a sense, a new paradise garden is created that allows for the regeneration of biological life on earth. In Finster’s case, this was an outcome promoted by the Pentecostal dove of the Holy Ghost, who gave him the ability to read and communicate the divine signs of impending apocalyptic disaster and potential renewal. It is tempting to speculate that the logolike image of a stick bird with a branch that started to appear on Finster’s artworks in the late 1980s alluded to the biblical dove.16 Finster noted on one of his thought cards (seemingly from the late 1970s or early 1980s) that Noah’s “holy dove . . . flew down through

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the ages until this present day. One has a nest near my walk way in front of Worlds Folk Art Church.”17 In the Bible, moreover, the reappearance of a new earth was an event signaled by that most dramatic of natural and sacred artworks or symbols, a rainbow that signifies a new divine-human covenant. Naturally amazing, it is a bow of multihued light that in portentously stormy weather communicates a message of re-creation and revival. Whether what is seen in the clouds is an occult divine face or a wondrously colorful arc of renewal is not the most important issue. Most significant is that the sky bears a token or sign that can reveal God’s cosmic templates of meaning and message. As the King James Version of this story says: And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my [rain]bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud. And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth. (9:12–17)

This amazingly widespread and resonant story of a destructive deluge and its blessed aftermath of re-creation—a tale found among many different world cultures—has been reworked and reimagined in countless ways.18 It is the basic plot structure of the story that constitutes a rainbowlike token or sign of some common awareness of the dangerous consequences of human action within the temporal vicissitudes of the natural and cultural worlds. However, defining the Noah story as mythical and not historical in the modern sense does not mean that such stories have no reference at all to actual individuals or ancient occurrences. They have been crafted together by various hands and minds from the odds and ends of remembered stories of persons and events in the past—that is, the past taken as a sign with a message. But are there remnants of a gigantic ancient wooden boat some 137 meters in length still waiting to be discovered somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Ararat? Numerous websites actually support such a proposition, but in the best MythBusters sense this is highly improbable. Was there a real Noah? No doubt there were passionately driven and frantically busy individuals in ancient times who were remembered as

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part of various storytelling or mythic cycles (such as the Sumerian Noah called Utnapishtim in the Gilgamesh story). These were the tales of tradition- and self-taught technicians of soul and spirit—technicians or artisans of wood and ecstasy—who recognized their special destiny as prophets and were inspired by their dreams and visions to speak, on behalf of the larger community, dark truths that were warnings. What is recounted in a traditional mythic tale such as the biblical Noah story is perhaps best related to what we might think of as a creatively artful telling, retelling, or dramatized revisioning, by an enraptured shaman, prophet, poet-bard, storyteller, or religious scribe, of some disastrous incident involving collective human foolishness and a calamitous reprisal. The truth is that there have always been at various nodal times in cultural development many first and second Noahs. What should be remembered is not the historicity of such stories but the symbolic import and moral guidelines ingrained in, for example, the many discursive and graphic interpretations of the Noah story found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—as well as in many other traditions. This is a fluid and infinitely applicable truth rooted in the story’s narrative structure and themes. It is irrelevant to the human and moral message of the Jewish and Christian Bible that the story is not a factual chronicle. What the Bible communicates is broadly meaningful because of its potency as a broadly applicable system of signs and messages. The Bible as myth has the power of a communal dream or a vision made public—as a story well imagined, well told, and effectively presented. It calls forth a hopeful response and, through its most ritually powerful stories, creates an alternative world that we may recreationally inhabit. The existential if not literal truthfulness of these events is not that such events actually happened in the manner described. Obviously such significant events—floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, asteroids, and other cataclysmic disasters—have occurred multiple times in the past, down to the present day, and in this sense a story of a great flood is truly a basic fact of human existence on the earth. The mythic legitimacy of these matters is not the historicity of one particular event but rather the larger, more generic, and recurrent reality common to the overall human narrative throughout time and space. Part of the meaning and message of this kind of myth or mythic theme, then, is the need to listen carefully, but not naively, to the crafty soothsayers’ stories, to accept our common culpability in these situations, to prepare for the worst, and to know finally that it is creatively and artistically possible to build an ark of temporary salvation. The basic narrative

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principle is the realization that ends are necessary for new beginnings. This is a principle that defines the basic plot of both individual and cultural life. Mythmaking about a final destructive end to all worldly things— especially the definitive Christian apocalypse told of in the book of Revelation—is a striking example of a later visionary variation on the mythic template of the Hebraic Noah. In the Christian scriptures, Jesus becomes the mythic second Noah and, in the latter days of the twentieth century, Finster saw himself in a similarly mythic way—as someone who fashioned a new ark of visionary cartoon scriptural art, a new picture-book-with-words revelation. As Finster shows us in his selfpublished book called Howard Finsters Vision of 1982, he replaced the wooden boat of the mythic past with a new ark (his rocket ship, called the Gladonia Super Angel) capable of sailing beyond the destructive menace of the Cold War into the vast heavenly seas of outer space. The Gladonia Super Angel is but one of several salvational arks fashioned by Finster throughout his years as a visionary artist. The ecstatically envisioned and sign-laden environment called Paradise Garden and the improbable sixteen-sided wooden flying saucer-edifice known as the World’s Folk Art Church are two other prominent examples. The Folk Art Church was designed to be a protective repository of art by all the unknown artists of the world, while the Garden, as Finster once said, was supposed to have “two of everything in the world.”19 The human condition is one where life is intrinsically entropic. Everything eventually runs down and, individually and socially, we too easily settle for base conformity, banality, and narrow self-interest. Creation, recreation, and re-creation in this sense are once and forever. And the need for regenerative and experiential re-creation—that is, the periodic refreshment, renewal, and revival of the world, the periodic alteration of human consciousness, and the periodic ecstatic stepping-outside of the world, the human community, and individual men and women— must be repeatedly undertaken by those artistically and technically skilled in the imaginative remaking of the world. It is their visionary art to have the special, persuasive cunning, the magical charisma, and the wily, creative skill to make our experience of ourselves and the world special again—no matter how temporary this effect may be. This is accomplished—albeit fleetingly—only by those crafty technicians of body and spirit who renew what is broken, banal, and thrown away. Drawing upon the age-old template of mythic discourse and ritual action, artists accomplish these operations by the creative use of move-

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ment and gesture, language and sound, story and narrative structure, humor and surprise, and image and line. The mythic stories told, ritually performed, and artistically painted by Howard Finster collectively resonate as “once upon a time” narratives that effectively, though temporarily, create and re-create within this rugged realm of clock time, multiple refreshingly peculiar alternative worlds for sinner folk to inhabit. Finster came from another world (Appalachian north Georgia and outer space) to show us how to recreate our lives in this fractured and fallen world. In Finster’s mythritual scheme of things it is finally the art that creatively revives and enlarges the religion. Amazement at the strangeness of it all can lead to an awareness of something sacred (set apart and different) lodged in the heart of the dispirited, discarded, and most profane aspects of life. In this way, Finster was a visionary prodigy of mythmaking and ritual performance, and his work helps us remember and put back together the interconnected truth of both religious and artistic expression. For Finster, this was a kind of hidden mythic or spiritual truth about his activities that was not effectively or graciously communicated by conventional forms of religion or the elite institutions of art. As he repeatedly said, he gave up preaching when he realized that very few ever remembered what he was saying or truly changed their behavior. The trick of it for Finster was to discover a new multimedia method for taking the millions of pieces of objects thrown away and putting them back together again. It was his seamless visionary linking of an artless art and an outer-space religiosity that proved to be the most effective system for getting messages across with some real transformative impact.

the primal unity of religion, art, and craft Finster’s approach to religion and art is remarkably suggestive of recent discoveries about the evolutionary and adaptive significance of the narrative craft of myth and the performative templates of ritual. These interrelated activities of oral and visual storytelling, along with dramatized playacting, are associated with the creative dawn of symbolic consciousness, language, and culture.20 Furthermore, these behaviors in prehistory were probably most significantly united in the person of the specialist of vision, skilled craft, and dramatized mythic story called the shaman.21 In later cultural and civilizational history these originally intertwined practices came to be distinguished as the separately organized domains of religious, artistic, and technical expertise. An appreciation of Finster’s

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special embodiment of vision, craft, religion, and art helps, therefore, reassemble some of the pieces of the evolutionary and cultural puzzle of religion and art as fundamentally interconnected symbolic technologies of life. Throughout human prehistory and history, religion and art have had a special relationship in terms of method and message. Both are protean sign systems that address us and call for a response. Neither is immediately utilitarian, yet they do important work in life. Both are cultural universals and consequently have a crucial adaptive role to play in the creation and continuation of human existence. Furthermore, in the modern Western era of enlightened disenchantment, this relationship between art and religion has been particularly strained and often antagonistic. Is it possible to reassemble those pieces of ourselves and to restore our relation to the multiple worlds of cultural experience that might again evoke some semblance of enchantment? Is it possible to reestablish some of the connection between ecstatic/religious and aesthetic/artistic experience and creative practice? We need a sign that marks the trail back to our cultural origins. Where are the dove and the rainbow during these times of global warming, rising sea levels, and our increasingly virtual and denatured lives?22 Where’s the third Noah in this post-Finsterian age? Who can see the human and divine faces in the Google and Amazon clouds? From the beginning of human culture, as vividly seen in the Paleolithic-era cave paintings in Europe, there was an impressionistic and highly stylized figurative art, along with a complex system of abstract markings and handprints, that seemed to function as special signs and messages with various myth-ritual meanings.23 Artistic skill (keeping in mind the etymological roots of art as related to practical skills or the craft of life) is not necessarily the draftsman’s ability to achieve mimetic, representational, or perspectival verisimilitude. Rather it is more fundamentally associated with the ability to produce visual symbolic marks, signs, or images that may or may not be figurative but which first, and effectively, call forth an emotional response and signify meaning.24 Contrary to ideas about the Western “invention” of abstraction and its apotheosis in abstract expressionism in New York in the 1940s, nonrealistic or patterned abstract markings or signs, along with highly stylized or cartoonlike figuration, were at the generative core of prehistoric image making and visual symbolic communication.25 This is dramatically seen in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and later tribal and civilizational art throughout all world cultures.26 This is also characteristic of much folk,

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visionary, and outsider art that is concerned with signage. Like so much of Finster’s work, it focuses on filling blank space with graphic marks, written words, and unknown glyphs—often in juxtaposition with highly stylized, cartoonish, iconic, or templatelike representational images— designed to provoke a reaction or evoke some storied meaning. It was the explicit and implicit message that counted, not the degree to which the image was “realistic.” What’s more, there is a highly suggestive connection between the early development of symbolic marks or abstract signs and the appearance of written linguistic systems.27 This deeply embedded and performative interconnection between stylized or storied images and written words is something that shamanistically inclined artists like Finster (and for that matter, someone like Basquiat) intuitively understood.28 The crux of the matter in terms of a visual response is that the image stands out and calls attention to itself as symbol or message when it is marked in some abstract way. X marks the spot.29 The ability to see mundane, lowly, or castoff things in terms of their x-rayed inner spiritual structure or skeletal template is to recognize the extraordinary in the ordinary. This shamanistic, visionary, or artistic ability to see the inner symbolic and storied nature of ordinary things is what has been called the crucial evolutionary adaptive artistic skill for making objects or images “special,” ritually storied, or meaningful.30 Archaeological consensus today generally supports the idea that these most primitive and primordial of Paleolithic images were probably a sacred art produced by the shaman-artist-technicians of the earliest human traditions. The inference is that these shamans were performatively painting marks and images as “sacred messages” that were expressive of mythic stories and ritual themes relevant to their visionary experiences and their intimate involvement in the life of the culture. As has become increasingly clear in the recent work of archaeologists, historians of religion, and those working in the burgeoning field of evolutionary biology and cognitive science, the emergence of a symbolic consciousness is directly related to the human creative ability to narratively imagine, express, and focus attention on “as if” or fictive scenarios of possible future outcomes in the struggle for survival. It is this ability to imagine the tensed meaning of time and things that is so strongly adaptive in the evolution of the human species. The crystallization of these propensities of symbolic consciousness is seen in the visionary storytelling and art-making that was at the prehistoric core of human cultural development.

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It is finally our ability to symbolize, understand, and evaluate temporal existence in relation to storied patterns or templates of a past, present, and future that distinctively characterize human culture.31 This is the special human talent for standing symbolically outside the present, for imagining a possible alternative to what is (via dreams, visions, out-of-body experience, waking reverie, reflective musement, and the instinctual-intuitive engagement of mind and body), and for persuasively communicating this narrative vision of persons and things to others in words, images, and actions. This capacity depends on an act of imaginative remembrance of the fragmented residue from the past in relation to ecstatic/visionary experience in the present guided by the cognitive template of patterned myth-telling, ritual practices, and image making. This kind of adaptively significant storytelling, dramatized behavior, and image making is best thought of as the myth-ritual complex of human symbolic cognition (language, music, visual art, and ritual behavior) that in early prehistoric cultures linked remembered tradition (often in the form of inherited myths and stories), ecstatic religious vision, storytelling and performance, and artistic visual expression via the intuitive cunning and creative skill of the shamanistic technician of the spiritual domain of life. It can be said that the prehistoric shaman was simultaneously a crafty artist, a technician, and a healer who was the first to take “the pieces [others] threw away / And put them together by night and day.” Religious vision, an aesthetic sensibility, and a craftsman’s skill are therefore fundamentally related to the world-constructing symbolic work of the narrative imagination. More than anything else, Finster’s self-understanding and art as related to the Noah story, as well as to other important mythemes, represent a kind of mythically playful—even prehistoric or primal—form of passionate creativity that helps us negotiate the ever present deluge, darkness, decadence, and death of human life. And it is this realization that reminds us of the implicit, and originally explicit, connections between religious and aesthetic experience going back to the Paleolithic origins of humankind. Although couched in a latter-day American Baptist idiom, Finster’s art is an enterprise that in its own self-taught, visionary, and eccentrically evangelical way represents a raw or primitive perspective on life. The message to all of us—whether one is a literalist or a symbolist, a religious believer or a cultural aesthete—is that there is, or can be, some mythically imaginative dove or rainbow as signs in human life. No matter how jaded or disenchanted we may have

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become, a regenerative response to the human predicament is always possible. There can, in other words, be moments of sheer shout-out-loud joy, humor, and wonderment that, however transient, renew our individual spirit, our immediate community, and the world around us! These special moments are intrinsically and simultaneously religious and aesthetic in that they manifest both the sacred and the sublime within the profane world. Art and religion are, as a result, conjoined in varying degrees of absorptive ecstasy when we experientially and symbolically stand outside our ordinary selves and see glimpses of other strange worlds. But these epiphanies often shine forth, amid the rain clouds, only with a little help from second or third Noahs, who see more directly the hopeful prospect of revival and redemption.

a surprising convergence While contemplating these matters of the mythic meaning, primal provenance, and existential significance of the Noah story, I found myself conducting one of my regular Internet searches for any news or gossip related to Finster and the outsider world. My concern in doing so was simply to keep tabs on the changing opinion about Finster and his work, to track the market value of his art, and to keep abreast of the uncertain developments concerning the preservation of Paradise Garden. Not unexpectedly, most of these sites contained the sincere but uncritical admiration of fans enamored of the appealing folksiness of the man, his overt Christian message, or simply the wonderful weirdness of his art. There was not very much insightful discussion of the larger nature and meaning of the man and the artwork as it related to artistic or religious tradition. Neither was there any probing discussion of Finster in relation to Southern or general American cultural history, what I have been calling the larger Finster phenomenon. Every now and again I would find something more intriguing. And at this time, well into the writing of this book (roughly at some point in late 2012), I rediscovered a website that I had bumped into before but had never paid much attention to. Looking more closely this time, I realized that the site was an unusually fascinating, broadly curious, and culturally perceptive appreciation of all manner of outsider art, roadside attractions, “weird ideas,” and other American pop culture oddities. Finster was only one topic among many, but he filled an extensive section in terms of both commentary and pictures. I refer to the

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site titled Interesting Ideas, produced by Bill Swislow, who is a vice president for marketing at the web-based company Cars.com as well as a long-standing member of the Chicago outsider art group called Intuit.32 What was haunting about this chance encounter was that, as I was reading Swislow’s description of a trip to Finster’s Paradise Garden sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I came across a startling observation. Swislow notes that he was particularly interested in photographing one-of-a-kind works because it was obvious that, given the pressures of fame and production, Finster was “already gearing up for the assembly line approach he took” throughout the 1990s. It was also true that, at that time, the “Garden still contained much of his greatest work, even if the battle against natural decay (much less voracious collectors) was being lost.” Then came the stunning and unnerving revelation. Swislow notes that, while surveying many of the remaining paintings in the Garden, he suddenly came across his “all-time favorite Finster work.” This was a large, framed painting that seemingly contained Finster’s hand-painted “improvements on [Gainsborough’s] Blue Boy” which Swislow was “only able to photograph through a window of the World’s Folk Art Church.” He then sadly notes that “if I knew then what I did now, I would have done whatever it took to buy it. But it’s only one of many that got away.”33 Below these words was a block of photos, one of which is a somewhat blurred-through-the-window image of the transformed reproduction of The Blue Boy. I felt a flush of gooseflesh since, in the interest of complete disclosure, I must confess that I was the one who altered The Blue Boy in the Finsterian manner that so appealed to Swislow. Indeed what Swislow had identified as his favorite Finster work was actually my reworked and collaged version of an old cardboard commercial reproduction of The Blue Boy that had been in my parents’ house in Atlanta for many years. After my first encounter with Finster back in the summer of 1985, a subsequent Finster exhibition and workshop in the fall of 1986, and my own special sojourn to and building project in Paradise Garden during the summer of 1987, I felt the urge to give Finster a gift of some kind of artwork to put in his World’s Folk Art Church. One summer while visiting my parents and brothers in Atlanta—at some point in 1988 or 1989—I happened across the old framed print of The Blue Boy and was inspired to alter it in keeping with several themes often seen in Finster’s work. Hence my collaged addition of copies of Finster images: a Finsterian angel and small Finster self-portrait figure in the back-

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ground, and the superimposition of a Finster head onto the boy in the painting, along with other borrowed details in the foreground, like the decorated snake gourd, the small “cow woman” image, and the tiny Coke bottle. As a finishing touch not seen in Swislow’s photo (and obviously not detected by Swislow) is the fact that I also wrote a longish, mock biblical inscription on the back and added a dated enumeration and an inscription and my signature on the lower-right corner of the work. When I presented this work to Finster, he seemed delighted with my efforts and promised me that it would have an honored place in the Folk Art Church. That was the last I saw of this work until quite a few years later. At some point in the mid- to late 1990s, I happened to see it— moldy and rather the worse for wear—propped up by a window in one of the newer small buildings in the Garden. But I did not see this painting again until I came across the unnerving commentary and picture on the Interesting Ideas website. I must admit along with Swislow that I was greatly chagrined that it seemed to have gotten away. Although it is perversely enticing to think that this work might have been purchased as an authentic Finster, such an outcome is not really possible since I had clearly taken credit for the work in the inscription on the lowerfront corner. Moreover, I could no longer find any copies of the photos I took of The Blue Boy when I first made the collage. Most likely, I decided as I reflected on these matters in 2012, this work had simply disappeared into the rotting debris of the Garden. At this point in my search for signs along the Finster trail, I could not help but feel that this collaged image of The Blue Boy, and now my story of its true origin, functioned as a portent for me. In some inadvertent and perhaps extraterrestrial way, it conveyed the message that my own story had somehow mythically converged with Finster’s story. I do not contend that this experience amounts to any kind of cosmic, harmonic, or Mayan conjunction. But for me, at least, there was obviously something meaningfully unsettling about this coincidental discovery. It surprised me. It addressed me. It called for some kind of response. At the very least, it would give rise to another story. Telling Finster’s stories as they impinge on my own experiences and stories means that I embrace an understanding of the study of religion that inhabits an academic “middle zone of people who are fascinated by religion and take its claims very seriously but don’t take it literally.” Such a discipline represents a “creative middle-approach that is neither religiously believing nor debunking.”34 Most important is to know that

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“people are always having spiritual experiences and those experiences are always being mediated by the imagination and how that imagination is shaped by a particular culture at a particular time.”35 It is this “middle zone” of convergence that defines my mission to understand Finster. As much as possible, I tell here the mythic, if not the simple gospel, truth about Finster’s incredible stories, religion, and art.

chapter 5

The Finster Mythos Just the Facts in Howard Finster’s Mythic Life

I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me. —William Blake

Howard Finster has led a life like a character in fiction. —Susan Hankla

My full story will never all be known by the earth people. For things in other worlds are beyond things of earths planet. —Howard Finster

[Shamanism] was made from something intrinsic to being human. . . . Mediation between realities. The original yard show of the heart. So deep that it is now known that certain shapes and imagery are hardwired into the human mind. Mediation. The shamanistic urge has not gone away. —Randall Morris

the creative chaos of the finster story Tom Patterson, one of Howard Finster’s early confidants, once observed, “Just listening to Finster talk is an extraordinary experience. The man is perpetually telling his life story, several times each day in various versions, to a constantly changing audience.” The problem with this 115

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exceedingly voluble and voluminous storytelling was that the story was “haphazardly intermingled with sermonettes, visionary anecdotes, sentimental homilies, contradictions, spontaneous songs, and flights of verbal fancy.” The whole thing seemed at first for Patterson, and I must admit for me also, “almost impossible to follow.”1 The superficially muddled nature of Finster’s oral and theatrical monologue cannot be denied, but (as both Patterson and John F. Turner show in their interpretive renditions of Finster’s narrative) the seeming chaos of the many aspects of the story may disclose an inner armature, as well as an often convoluted yet relentless plot made up of a crazy quilt of themes from various and sundry sources. Despite the ambiguities and seeming disorder, the Finsterian cycle of stories has, in the final analysis, some alluring mythic coherence and power. Whether this hidden order is discovered to be there in the original stories themselves or is mostly made up by those who tell the story of Finster’s stories is not a simple matter. The stories are too repetitiously convoluted and at times contradictory for that. Inconsistencies, which are found in most scriptures, such as the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, are intrinsic to the arresting strangeness of a narrative for the believers, fans, and learned commentators. This intertwined chaos and order is the jumbled mystery of the Finster phenomenon. Often in Finster narratives there is a certain digressive and rhetorical law of multiples at work, the persistent spiraling around certain basic experiences, themes, and images until the observer exhaustedly comes to the conclusion that something truly foreordained yet outlandish has transpired. The experience may be immediately inexplicable in words and concepts, but there is some conviction in its peculiar meaningfulness. Thus the whole Finster phenomenon—the interconnected personality, performance, stories, environment, and art—ultimately functions as a collective sign. It might even be similar to a particularly memorable sequence of See Rock City, Jesus Saves, Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco, and Burma Shave signs serially spread out on the road of life. That is, the road to eternity, as expressed in Finster’s Cold War apocalypse seen in Road to Eturnety (figure 13). In like manner, the Finster signage constantly circles back on itself, draws attention, and demands a response and, oftentimes, a monetary exchange. And in the case of Finster the whole experience of the man and his art is unusually moving even if the complete meaning, not only the overt Christian message, is unclear or at times off-putting. One way to examine the simultaneous chaos and order, the fractal pattern, and the mythic—the intertwined religious and artistic—nature

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figure 13. Howard Finster, Road to Eturnety, 1985. Lithographic print on paper, 22 x 27.5 inches. Artwork no. 4963. Lehigh University Art Galleries Collection. Photograph by Steven Lichak. © Finster Estate.

of the Finster story is to look at some of the recurrent themes and images, see how they are interrelated, and search out their multiple origins in scripture, visionary experience, and all kinds of popular and profane culture. Noah, Abbie, born-again and out-of-body experiences, Holy Ghost feelings, flying saucers, George Washington, and Elvis—all these figures, stories, themes, and experiences were sacred signs in Finster’s personal myth. Portents and omens from beyond. My analysis begins with a consideration of Finster’s core identity as the visionary Stranger from Another World, a mythic theme that undergirds many of the other themes and experiences. I focus here only on some of the most important and recurrent mythemes, motifs, and images associated with Finster’s culminating identity as a strange seer of other worlds and as an extraterrestrial sign-painter of sacred art (such themes as his secret story, the hidden man, the Second Adam, and the Elvis angel). All these elements come together in the central generative mytheme of Finster’s “redemptive self” as the shamanistic Man of Visions.2

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the stranger from another world As much as he declared himself the Second Noah, Howard Finster also loudly proclaimed in words and images that he was fundamentally akin to the primal patriarch of the Hebrew scriptures (the Christian Old Testament), Abraham the Stranger (see Genesis 23:3–4 and the different variations throughout the Hebrew scriptures). So also is the prototypical King David called a “stranger in the earth” in Psalms (119:19). All three (Finster, Abraham, David) were strangers, sojourners, or resident aliens on this planet. At times, Finster’s identity as the Stranger from Another World was even more significant than his prophetic role as a latter-day Noah. As he became increasingly absorbed in spinning his intricate web of stories from various biblical, popular, and visionary sources, it was the theme of the stranger that most fully and efficiently defined his new identity as an otherworldly painter of sacred art. As the stranger theme was repeatedly enunciated—beginning at the time of his finger epiphany in the 1970s and continuing throughout his intensely creative period in the 1980s—Finster was swept into a vortex of activity and attention that he did not always understand or control. What he did know was that it was necessary to sustain the enthusiasm—his own and that of his fans—that fueled his growing celebrity and was rooted in the reaction to his impressive charisma and ever-expanding strangeness. The truth may also be that as his identity as God’s sign painter took off in increasingly unpredictable ways, Finster was ever more alienated from himself and his former vocations. On the other hand, the wily Finster seemed to know intuitively that his manifest eccentricity had the double appeal and power of attraction/ repulsion associated with something truly beyond the standards of normalcy. Notoriety, even if sometimes negative, was for Finster a sign that people were getting the message. Finster’s identity as a stranger also had the great advantage of being open-ended in terms of its possible content and meaning. Like religiously tinged stories of UFO contactees of the 1950s into the 1970s, and more malevolent “alien abduction” tales from the 1960s through the 1990s, Finster’s self-cultivated narrative of interplanetary outlandishness effectively meshed bits and pieces of conventional biblical images with all manner of popular enthusiasms and fears and was embellished with Finster’s own dreams, visions, and Holy Ghost feelings. Although Finster did not mention many of the pop-cultural interplanetary strangers by name, his awareness of and fondness for popular TV depictions

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of alien visitors and flying saucers is seen in many of the painted images and words he produced throughout the 1980s. One of his long-term friends in Summerville was John C. Turner, a high school teacher who testifies to the fact that Finster loved to talk about flying saucers and UFOs.3 A fascinating example of these interests is seen in one of Finster’s poems, titled “Saucers and Signs,” dating probably to the 1960s or 1970s.4 This work opens with the following stanza: There are signs and saucers— Which are passing across us— The objects we dont understand— They are round and bright— They are seen of the [night]— The secret and mystery of man. ... These signs and saucers— Which are far up above— Are known by their shape and size— But what is inside Are they destructive Are they wise.

In this poem, and even more emphatically in his later career, these saucers were, for Finster, “signs” of visitors from other worlds that potentially revealed religious mysteries and secrets. The message, however, was cryptic in the manner of the famous salvational words by the outerspace alien Klaatu in the film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951): “Klaatu barada niktu!” The words of the space stranger Finster were ambiguous in the sense that it was not clear what or who was inside these saucers: “Are they destructive [or] / Are they wise[?]” But in some final verses he concludes that the most important of their “secrets” was the knowledge that “this world is not our home.” In the end, we must “leave it far behind.”5 The stranger theme became most pronounced in the crucial transformational years of the 1960s through the 1980s, when Finster was in the midst of intense visionary experiences, artistic experimentation, and dramatic self-exploration. In 1977, for example, he produced what can be taken as his definitive statement in word and image of this culminating sense of personal and cosmic strangeness (no. 1048, 1978; figure 14).6 On a large rectangular burlap banner hanging in the garden during the 1980s (and later as one of his major hits reproduced in different

figure 14. Howard Finster, I am Howard Finster a Stranger from Another World, 1978. Enamel paint on burlap, 44.5 x 24.5 inches. Artwork no. 1048. John F. Turner Collection. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree. © Finster Estate.

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ways),7 he boldly declared to the world: “i am Howard Finster a Stranger from Another World. My father and mother, my sisters and brothers, my wife, my childre[n] my grandchildren have realy never figured me out for my kingdom is not of this world only my fathe[r] in heaven knows me on this planet and thats why I have been strong and happy, when my work is finished I will go back to other worlds.” Carrying a cross and dressed in a heavy winter coat and hat, Finster in the painting looks rather forlorn, staring straight ahead. Interestingly the stranger theme here has already taken on various biblical meanings, so that the Abrahamic element is overwhelmed by his identification with Jesus as another cross-carrying alien visitor to this planet. This theme of a messianic outer-space stranger becomes stronger in later years, but the association here dramatizes his multiple roles as a Christlike savior as well as an Abrahamic patriarch and Noahide prophet. The words above and to the side of his head indicate that his real reason for building his garden (“this park of broken pieces”) was to create a sign of his earthly mission to “mend a broken world of people who are traveling their last road.” Given the apocalyptic implications of pilgrims traveling on “their last road” within a broken world, Finster was also implying that his own presence on earth during those fractured times anticipated to some degree the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The painting makes clear that it is important, then, that, before going “back to other worlds,” Finster stays “strong and happy” in the face of these weighty burdens.

the secret story As suggested by the mosaic of meanings found in the stranger banner, Finster was continually combining and transforming bits and pieces from various sources into an evolving and ever-stranger story about his special destiny on this planet. There is much evidence in his myriad jottings and thought cards that he was very much aware of the need to be constantly constructing, expanding, and revising his life’s story. He writes at one point in 1970, right at the threshold of his fame as an artist, that he had “seen a story” and had realized that it was his own story—part of which was always “kept in secret.”8 No one “will ever know” these secrets, since they were found only “in Gods reacord.” Even Finster himself admits that there are “manny things” he didn’t understand about his own life’s story, and that many things would no doubt stay hidden until the end of days. He also says that as his story

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“grows longer and old” there is a temptation to hope for a romantic ending involving a “beautiful rainbowe” and a “pot of gold.” Writing in 1970 (to be exact, 12:20 a.m., September 18, 1970), when he had already been frantically working on the garden while trying to make a living as an odd-job man and bicycle/lawn mower/TV repairman, Finster suggests that he was experiencing a difficult personal situation involving perhaps a depressed state of mind, health problems, financial troubles, family tensions, or neighborly calumny (or some combination of these). He confesses that he’s not at all sure about any kind of happy “end of [his] story.” While recognizing that he is still involved in the ongoing “making” of his story, he feels that things are getting “darker and darker,” which is shadowing the light and “destroying life away.” On a seeming note of despair, he opines that his current story, and the larger story of the world at that time, is “so sorryful” that he “can hardly write” at all. And then, unable to resist a final rhyming couplet, he concludes by saying that if he “should live to write the end./ would there be anough ink for [his] fountain pen.” There may well be an intimation here of the depths of the personal turmoil he was experiencing, which would lead a few years later, in 1976, to the visionary turning point in Finster’s life story. As symbolized by the initiatory episode of the finger face’s command to overcome his fear, Finster eventually embraced his difficulties and his strangeness and embarked upon a divinely sanctioned career as a painter of sacred art. Out of the darkness came a sign—as in the story of Noah, when, at the height of Noah’s anguish as the ark floated on the dark waters of the flood, there was, finally, a “beautiful rainbow.” There was a “dove,” too, in the guise of Finster’s “warm feelings” given to him by the Holy Ghost. Instead of having to merely write out the rest of the story (for which there would not “be anough ink for [his] fountain pen”), he now would enthusiastically and obsessively combine words with images, ink with tractor enamel, and music and movement to tell some of his hidden secrets as a cosmic alien no longer afraid of his multifaceted strangeness. His acceptance of his own uniqueness was his most powerful and liberating sign for people in a broken world. For him personally, there was newfound strength and healing happiness to be gained from this revelation.

the hidden man Related to the idea of the stranger, and the secret story of darkness giving way to light, is another of Finster’s favorite themes, one that is inter-

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woven, like many other constantly shifting motifs, with the pivotal finger-face vision of 1976. I refer to the “hidden man of the heart” motif, which Finster (acting as the “quickening spirit” from “heaven” described in 1 Corinthians) takes from the first book of Peter in the New Testament (3:1–4; the motif is sometimes associated with the last, or second, Adam; 1 Corinthians 15:45–47): . . . ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; While they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear. Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price [emphasis added].

In Finster’s appropriation of this passage, the “hidden man of the heart” phrase is detached from its biblical reference to the submission of wives to their husbands (even those husbands who are not law abiding). He interprets it as referring to the inner, spiritual, or authentic person as distinct from all external appearances, outward adornments, and deceptions. In the face of a sinful nature and superficial temptations, the important thing, in Finster’s interpretation, is to know how to discover and recognize one’s own inner nature, special talent, and true destiny. For some, such as Finster, this realization might come in the form of a sudden vision late in life that challenges them to change their lives, to do things they never thought possible (“paint sacred art”), and, no matter how difficult, to accept who they really are (stranger, prophet, artist, performer, celebrity). This theme of the hidden man resonates with a whole host of mythically potent secret-identity tropes in popular culture and comics, from Clark Kent/Superman on down to Bruce Wayne/Batman, Peter Parker/ Spiderman, Bruce Banner/Hulk. and so on. These are characters found in word and image narratives whose “surface egos” possess “an alter ego, another superself with amazing powers.” This can even be said to be rooted in the camouflaged mythic meaning of certain comics, “what sets the superheroes and mystics apart from the rest of us . . . is that they already know that they are Two. They have become conscious of that which is unconscious in the rest of us. They have more fully actualized their own human potential.”9 The same could be said of Finster’s discovery of his own hidden, superhuman identities and visionary talents. By the 1970s, Finster saw

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himself as having multiple personalities as well as the creativity and strength of Jesus Christ, superstar and superhero from outer space. Creativity, whether artistic or religious, and the extraordinary energy or busy industriousness that goes along with an intensely creative period, are “often experienced as coming from elsewhere, as if [these forms of creativity] were being literally empowered by nonordinary energies or forces that temporarily overwhelm” the creator “in order to bring new ideas, images, or words into the field of awareness.” This kind of ecstatically creative busyness or inspired behavior is another example of a category of experience that has “clear religious roots” in the sense that the creativity and visionary experience are most often discovered, dreamed, envisioned, or “en-spirited” and “breathed” into us from some other world or state of consciousness.10 Knowledge of one’s own true nature and unique talent—one’s true strangeness as a hidden (super)human being—will almost always come to us as a “discovery.” It comes that way if it comes at all. The sad truth is that many never encounter their own hidden man or woman. As Finster says, “If the people on this planet Earth would bring out the hidden man of the heart, there’s no tellin’ what’s in some of ’em. Some of ’em could have been a President and they’ve never been hardly anything because they never did bring out anything that was in them. Just like takin’ a quart of milk and stickin’ it in the refrigerator and lettin’ it sit there till it spoils. That’s the way a lot of people do—they won’t try anything.”11 The crucial lesson here, as Finster saw it, is that you “discover your talent and all” by always “try[ing] everything.”12 Finster’s realization of this principle is, of course, seen in the multiple stories of his vocational endeavors and, as his wife, Pauline, would say, in his inveterate and relentless busyness. But it is essential to recognize that his many overlapping stories of past accomplishments are constantly pulled along, shaped, inflated, and transformed by the new discoveries he was making about himself during his passionate, even manic, years of creative mythmaking, art production, and visionary experience in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period he was actively incorporating the stories of his earlier, busybut-mostly-mundane life into a much more dramatic and full-blown mythic narrative and performance, in which he finally accepted his heretofore hidden or secret identity in all its biblical, visionary, and extraterrestrial eccentricity. It is this sense of the culminating coalescence of a master narrative or script—made up of an interlocking set of stories told, performed, and painted—that I call the Finster mythos.

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the mythos unfolds These lived stories constitute a mythos—that is, Finster’s final conjoined personal and celestial narrative or overarching plot—in the sense of an expanded, roughly coordinated, and layered set of smaller mythemes or plotlines (themes, tropes, motifs, images) constructed from remembered experiences and made-up embellishments taken from various sources. The sources are diverse, but they specifically include daily life experiences, Bible stories and images, and popular culture as communicated by TV and other mass media. All of this was supplemented, framed, and heightened by Finster’s extraordinary aspirations, dreams, and visions. The mythic pretensions of these stories dealt with all manner of issues having to do with the conditioned or flawed (Finster would say sinful) nature of human existence. Finster’s own hard life of heroic industry and incessant struggle, or more accurately the collection of stories he told about his life, was but a sign of the larger “sorryful” human condition. This refers to the temporal and contingent nature of all human life: that men and women bleed, grow old, and die; that our knowledge of ourselves and the world is limited; and that we are social creatures who persist in being selfish and mean to each other. And at times there’s hope and joy, empathy and love, too. There is no need to assume that the existence of certain common plots or narrative patterns depends on the archetypal dynamics of some “collective unconscious” postulated and popularized by the psychologist Carl Jung or the comparativist Joseph Campbell. Rather, the basic templates that coalesce the individual experiences and influences seen in Finster’s mythmaking, as with other basic plots seen in world narratives (that is, stories or plotlines involving a “quest,” “overcoming a monster,” a “voyage to another world and return,” “rebirth,” “rags to riches,” “tragedy,” and “comedy”), have more to do with the common existential and evolutionary realities of human life that generate deepseated forms of motivation and action.13 It could well be said, therefore, that “the basic themes and situations” of stories are a product of “fundamental, evolved interests human beings have in love, death, adventure, family, justice, and overcoming adversity.” In other words, story plots or templates are not “unconscious archetypes but structures that inevitably follow . . . from an instinctual desire to tell stories about the basic features of the human predicament.”14 They have to do with a “universal grammar” of contending with life’s existential dilemmas.15 Needless to say, some storytellers are more powerfully driven and more

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effective than others in constructing a narrative with existential and mythic resonance.

the narrative armature Finster’s individual artworks always involved a recurrent dimension or armature; by the 1970s, the same had become true of Finster’s own understanding and narration of his life. His story—as told and retold, rehearsed and revised, performatively enacted and repeatedly transformed, numbered, and signed—took on a myth-ritual life. This everevolving story reflected lived realities; but at the same time, it made real—in paint and concrete, words and images—an alternative reality that existed only on other, imaginary planets. Finster consequently produced and framed his life the way he created his art—that is, by relying on the infinitely replicable imagery of his cutout templates and, often, by using one of his self-embossed and mass-produced wooden frames. In a sense, his entire mythic life was composed of a concatenation of cutout, cutup, and charismatically collaged images, episodes, and themes. Along with his distinctive and ubiquitous signature, numbering, dating, and scrawled homilies, there was, as in a good roadside sign, a strong indication of the importance of stamping one’s own distinctive and coherent stylistic mark, brand, or trademark on the mythic signage. There are various grand narratives—or a kind of “universal grammar”16—in Finster’s art, notably narratives that go back to the Adamic, Abrahamic, Noahide, and Davidic origins of biblical time as a way of telling a stranger’s story of the past, present, and future history of the world. These narratives always involved Finster’s mythic projection of himself into the religious and cosmic story of the world. This projection is, nevertheless, dynamic and kaleidoscopic, involving themes cobbled together from all kinds of sources—the Bible, clearly, but also influences from popular culture, along with wilder, more visionary broadcasts generated by his own internal television. Given Finster’s vast production of words, images, signs, environments, songs, books, constructions, and performances, it is not possible to present a full inventory of the many episodic mythemes. As Finster once said, “I tell you nobody can write my story. It’s too long. Tapes won’t hold it. Volumes won’t hold it.”17 However, it is feasible to lay out the overall structure of the grand narrative and to identify several key images and plotlines that make up what I call the mythic

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armature of beginning (creation/birth, early life, and struggle), middle (adversity, maturity, life-cycle transformation), mythic hinge (the initiatory vision), and termination (signs of the end, hero’s quest, healing/ salvation, decline/death). Mythic Beginnings: Creation/Birth, Early Life, and Struggle The emergent mythic template of Finster’s life meant that the ambiguities of his birth date (1915 or 1916) became a religious mystery having to do with his primordial, even miraculous, conception on the chaotic swirl of the “foam stone of life” (as Vision Map, a painting from 1978, suggests; plate 5).18 These holy events continued down through a series of early life premonitions and visionary anticipations (the vision of Abbie on the celestial escalator most prominently), along with numerous strange dreams of flying. These portents of his destiny were, however, embellished by phases of sinfulness, being born again at thirteen, discovering somewhat later the vocation of preacher, getting married, and starting a family, along with all the small accomplishments and many disappointments of hard work both domestic and church related. From his beginnings as a markedly curious and gifted child with the ability to read the fortunes of others, and then throughout his life as a family man, itinerant preacher, and practitioner of twenty-one or twenty-two not very well-paying trades, Finster experienced sporadic achievements always qualified by a constant struggle for recognition.19 Mythic Middle: Adversity, Maturity, Life-Cycle Transformation The critical turning point and the discovery of Finster’s own hidden man came when, disturbed by his congregation’s forgetfulness of his sermons and his inability to make a good enough living as a pastor, he gave up on regular preaching and focused on his more profitable wood crafts and all sorts of repair work (bicycles, TV, lawnmowers, and other mechanical devices and appliances) for his neighbors and community. It may well be, as John F. Turner points out, that his relative lack of success with his preaching was simply that he was not “doctrinaire” or conventional enough. It seems that his interpretation of scripture at times was “too far out” for the congregations he was dealing with. And at various times, he preached at forty or so different churches.20 It was this period in his later life (roughly in the 1960s, when he was in his fifties) that he moved to the small community of Pennville (situated

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between the larger towns of Trion, where he had constructed the first of his roadside parks, and the county seat of Summerville). At some point after moving to Pennville he seems to have stumbled into darkness and despair. In the midst of this, he started having Holy Ghost feelings and had a vision of a ten- or fifteen-foot-tall man ordering him “to get on the altar,” which caused him to embark on a kind of spirit quest of heroically creative labor.21 The fruit of this activity was the transformation of the swampy land around his homestead into what became his Paradise Garden and eventually, in the early 1980s, the World’s Folk Art Church. Mythic Hinge: The Initiatory Vision On the verge of being born yet again at the age of sixty, Finster found, in a talking smudge of white paint on one of his outstretched fingers, his definitive mythic destiny as an artistic stranger. The first visionary painting he produced was of George Washington, or so the story goes. Given the centrality of this particular mytheme, the time has come to present a canonical version of this transformative vision. What follows is the version of the finger epiphany told by Finster’s daughter Thelma: As my father tells it, he was in the middle of painting a bicycle when it happened. He was touching up a patch on a bicycle frame with white paint and glanced down at one of his fingers in the middle of the job. There on the round tip of his finger and centered in white paint, my father saw the image of a human face. My father sat looking at his fingertip in wonderment for a few moments and then felt a familiar feeling wash over him. It was the same kind of warm feeling he had had the night he was saved in that revival tent outside Violet Hill School. It was the same feeling he’d had at three when he saw his sister descend from the clouds above his farmhouse. . . . This time, sitting alone in his workshop, my father knew that he was about to get a visit from another world. He waited for several moments in silence, staring at the face on his fingertip, and then he heard a familiar voice speaking to him. “Paint sacred art.” Stunned, my father sat in the quiet space of his workshop for several moments, contemplating God’s odd edict. After several moments, my father responded. My father answered that he could not do what God was asking, that he had no training to paint anything other than bicycles, houses, and little backyard mansions. After a couple of moments, the voice returned with a simple question. “How do you know?” Dad sat on that question for several moments and then realized that he didn’t have a good answer. . . . He had no choice but to find an answer to that challenging question God posed to him in his workshop that afternoon. . . . So my father took a dollar bill out of his wallet, tacked it onto a piece of plywood, and decided he would try to draw the face of George Washington. My father started out thinking he was going to show God that He’d picked the wrong

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man for the job. But by the time he finished drawing, he realized God was right. He could draw and paint after all. So on that day, my father accepted the job God had offered to him and he started painting himself down a path that would transform the rest of his life.22

It would be an interesting exercise to compile as many different versions of this story as possible.23 From even a partial inventory, it is obvious that many of the individual “facts” in the story tend to slip and slide (e.g., the nature of this first painting, the time of the event, the identity of the face that appeared on his finger, and so on). Moreover, as seen in Thelma’s version, where the finger face’s “familiar voice” is quickly identified as “God,” there is a bias toward skewing the original mystery of the event in traditional theological ways. But the most important mythic truth of the story is that, despite various discrepancies in the details, the visionary armature or template stays the same. The core meaning of the event seems not to be the precise identity of the voice, but rather the basic fact that something extraordinary occurred. An irrevocable initiatory transformation in Finster’s personality and life had taken place. Baptized in white tractor enamel instead of water or blood, Finster had undergone another born-again experience. His hidden cosmic identity as a prophetic sign-maker and stranger, destined to produce sacred art, was now fully revealed to himself and the world. Given the nature of mythic fabulation and the importance of artifacts or relics documenting revelatory occurrences, it is worth noting that in the years after this event in 1976 there was increasing confusion as to exactly what was the first painting. By the mid-1980s there were in fact a number of different “first” or “almost first” works that had little to do with George Washington. It seems that Finster had responded to his fans’ demand to gaze upon the “first painting” by making several versions available for viewing.24 For Finster it was the mythic moment that counted, not the historical truth of any one image or painting. It was, then, not a matter of a literal first image but rather the larger truth of this once-upon-a-time event when visions and painted images started to gush forth from his mind and hands.

Mythic Termination: Signs of the End, Hero’s Quest, Healing/Salvation, Decline/Death The Finster mythos eventually took up the larger cosmic and global signs of the end-time, in the sense of apocalyptic ruminations that blend

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themes from the Book of Revelation, and visionary explorations of hell (meetings with Adolf Hitler, no cold Coca-Colas or restrooms in hell) and other planets. Themes also came from popular documentary and fictional TV and film accounts of atomic Cold War destruction, Twilight Zone–style and Outer Limits–style alien invasion, 1950s B-movie mutant monsters, racial-segregationist conflict, the domino fears of the Vietnam years, youthful rebellion and drug experimentation, and global catastrophe. The labors of the heroic stranger were successful in some ways, but ultimately Finster’s accomplishments and energy were diminished by renewed family friction and his deteriorating health, which led to his decline and his sad, yet atoning, death, disappearance, and departure to other planets. The issue of a hero’s salvation is typically a matter suggested by the Latin roots of the word—that is, not a final and everlasting transcendence of this world but an act of temporary healing, or salvus, of the world that requires additional heroes. Not one Second Coming but Multiple Comings, rebirths, and revivals. And then it all starts over again: the Fall and re-creation. Creation/creativity depends on many repeated recreations/re-creations. The hero’s departure from this world leads to more familial dissention and, depending on the effectiveness of those who continue the story, invariably leads to amnesiac distortions, nostalgic exaggeration, routinized charisma, and commercial exploitation. In remembrance, the hero may in turn take different forms, often undergoing a cultic apotheosis and emerging as a “classic” artist or figure (in keeping with a preestablished set of modernist and formal criteria of “quality”). This is accompanied by the enhanced monetary value and sacrality of relic-like material objects associated with the body, spirit, and signature of the hero. The greatly contested question about the sacred quality, power, or mana of the artist and the art is largely variable and depends on the guardians of mainstream cultural taste prevailing at any particular point in time.25 Finster’s role as a kind of messianic savior and culture hero is augmented by various paintings and signs depicting past national heroes, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, and John Kennedy; popular legendary characters, like Santa Claus; comic, TV, and movie heroes; and famous dead entertainers, like Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe. Finster valued these music and movie stars primarily for their singular celebrity, if not their particular talents or lasting contributions to the world. It was this kind of raw celestial fame and marketability, as distinguished from any offsetting

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moral considerations, that seemed to guarantee their angelic significance. Interestingly, Elvis, as the Southern poor boy who transcended his roots and transformed the world, is by far the most important of these popular figures, becoming even a visionary touchstone for Finster and a separate theme in his overall mythos.

elvis as angel and ghost The fact that Elvis Presley had special status in Finster’s pantheon of angelic celebrities is evident from Finster’s response to Liza Kirwin of the Smithsonian Institution, who in an extended interview in 1984 asked him about his “most powerful Biblical verse.” Surprisingly, Finster at first offered no actual Bible verse at all, but instead quickly slipped into a discourse on Elvis Presley, who had appeared in the Garden right after his tragic death (August 16, 1977). This Elvis story did finally remind Finster of several Bible verses about death and calling upon the Lord, which then led into a rambling dissertation suggesting that Elvis possessed the “celestial body” of a “Second Adam.”26 Other indications that Elvis was held in special esteem are the number of different Elvis cutouts Finster produced and Finster’s identification with many aspects of Elvis’s life. For example, Finster identified with the singer’s humble workingclass upbringing and religious interests (although in later life these were often more New Agey spiritualist than conventionally Christian), Elvis’s discovery of his own hidden-man talent for singing, and perhaps most especially, Elvis’s overwhelming charisma and celebrity. Finster’s identification with Elvis was reinforced by Elvis’s premature death in 1977, just a year after Finster’s discovery of his own hidden talent and right at the time that his own celebrity was about to take off. When Finster acquired fame and money toward the end of the 1980s, he was able to move into what he called an “executive mansion” on the prosperous side of Summerville, several miles down the road from Pennville and the Garden. This was a large, columned, colonial-style house with several outbuildings and an in-ground swimming pool. It was, in other words, Finster’s own Graceland that, in his mind, put him in the same celestial league as Elvis.27 Finster went on to claim several significant visionary sightings of Elvis, the most famous being his meeting with Elvis in Paradise Garden not long after visiting Graceland with John F. Turner in 1982.28 The fullest context for this vision is recorded in Finster’s “Sermon on Elvis” given in Oxford, Mississippi, at the First International Elvis Conference

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in 1995. Finster took this opportunity to talk mostly about his life history in all its folk-mythic glory and how it paralleled the iconic events in Elvis’s life. Both of them, he declares, produced “miracles” in their lives. The implication throughout the talk is their affinity as special artistic visitors bringing a religious message to this planet. At one point Finster raises the question of why he admires Elvis and other figures, like Abraham Lincoln. He responds to his own rhetorical query by observing, like a good marketer, that “everybody in the world knows ’em.” He explains that he makes art about them because, when people “see them[,] they know who they are and they come to see what the things all about.” Even more telling is Finster’s identification, as a maverick folk artist, with Elvis, a similarly inclined musical artist-performer: “They call me a folk artist because I do my own thing. And I’ve said to myself, and said this very day, that’s what Alvis was. He was a folk artist of music. He was a folk artist of what he was called fer to do in this world. God says many are called but a few are chosen.”29 When Finster finally gets around to describing his actual vision and conversation with Elvis in the Garden, the account given in his sermon is curiously abbreviated.30 While working in a flower bed somewhere in Paradise Garden, he tells us, he had a feeling that he was being watched. And when he turned around, he saw the “whole front of [a] body” and recognized a seemingly incarnate Elvis wearing a “light-blue shirt and open collar and dark-blue pair of pants.” He remarks that Elvis appeared as a young man at the peak of his career. Frightened by his famous visitor, Finster is unable to confront the apparition and, ever industrious, turns back to continue trimming his flower bed. Fearful and amazed, he wants to talk, but can only bring himself to stammer something like: “Elvis, can you stay a while?” Alluding to their shared busyness in life, the Elvis specter suddenly disappears with these dismissive words: “Howard I’m on a tight schedule.”31 At the end of this fated encounter, both Finster and Elvis’s ghostly body had to focus on what Elvis always called the important principle of keeping busy by TCB (taking care of business). This haunted encounter was more humorous than scary—and a little sad. The garden rendezvous with dead Elvis highlights the extraordinary importance of visionary experience for Finster. In keeping with the mythic template that shaped Finster’s life during the period from the 1960s through the 1980s, there were several noteworthy visionary nodes. The most significant was his remembered childhood vision of his dead sister, Abbie, which predicted his destiny, the later experience of a (ten- or fifteen-foot) “giant man” in the 1960s that gave him the cour-

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age to embark upon the Garden, and then, most dramatically and transformationally, the initiatory event of the finger-face vision in January 1976.32 As thought cards from the period of the early Garden demonstrate, Finster was obsessively experiencing and writing about all sorts of increasingly intense visions and dreams, which reached a kind of crescendo in the self-published and illustrated book called Howard Finsters Vision of 1982. Clearly Finster believed that he was living out God’s words about the last days and the need for prophesy. These texts are found in Acts 2:17 and Joel 2:28 and are among the most widely, and often exaggeratedly, applied within evangelical tradition. The most pertinent passage in Acts reads: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, said God, I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” As always, Finster embraced this prediction in the fullest sense, so that he personally both embodied prophesy with the visionary prowess of young men and embodied the powerful waking dreams of old men. The subsequent passages in this text also help explain Finster’s exaggerated sense of divine destiny during this intense period of visionary experience and artistic creativity. It is stated in Acts 2:18–22 that, in the days during the end-time, a “man approved by god” will come to earth and show people “miracles and wonders and signs.” The “man approved by God” specifically refers to “Jesus of Nazareth,” but Finster seems to be assuming that identity or consciousness as well as the personae of various Old Testament patriarchs and prophets. God himself is said to demonstrate “wonders in heaven above.” However, it is a stranger who is charged with making the “signs” on “the earth beneath”—that is, depictions of all the “blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke” that will consume the world during the end of days. These “signs” may be many things, but almost anything may be seen as a significant message. One visible message created by Finster is a vivid depiction of the warning “the sun shall be turned into darkness” and “the moon into blood” (these phrases come from Acts 2:20 and Revelation 6:12) in a painting seemingly from the very year of the famous fingerface vision.33

the man of visions The centrality of visionary experience in the culminating phase of the Finster mythos brings me to the master mytheme for understanding

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Finster as both a religious and an artistic virtuoso. The discussion of Finster as the Man of Visions—or variously his visions, reveries, dreams, out-of-body experiences, and strange, otherworldly things he saw and felt—necessarily raises the issue of the prototypical visionary specialist in the history and prehistory of religion and art. This specialist, who was truly the first mythmaker and storyteller for others, is a figure we have already encountered, the shaman—that is, a religious functionary named in, and classically defined by, Siberian circumpolar hunting and gathering traditions but also found throughout many other tribal traditions.34 This kind of person was the tribal ritual specialist, technician of the sacred, or skilled practitioner of ecstatic states of consciousness who made his or her dreams and visions public for the psychic, bodily, and social health of the tribe. In many tribal cultures, the shaman was very much the person who imaginatively and theatrically traveled to other worlds, both celestial and infernal regions, to confront spirit entities and ancestral souls. Moreover, these actions were undertaken on behalf of individuals and the community. I emphasize shamanistic phenomena as an interpretive tool in preference to so-called mystic phenomena because of the shaman’s priority in cultural history and the fact that, whatever its ambiguities, shamanism is itself a template for many (not all!) traits called mystical. Mystics are persons within organized religious traditions who have shamanistic ecstatic and transformative experiences of spiritual entities, heavenly domains and otherworldly realms. Examples include Sufis in Islam, desert mystics in early Christianity, kabbalists in Judaism, Tantric practitioners in Hinduism, and Buddhist or Daoist mystics in Chinese religion. This issue, of course, raises numerous other difficulties associated with the naming and categorization of visionary figures in different cultures. There is, however, a demonstrable continuum of ecstatic experience and practice within Western tradition linking such figures as patriarchs, prophets, messiahs, saints, mediums, and mystics (recognizing the existence of alternative labels in other languages).35 In tribal cultures, the shaman’s difficult vocation as a public dreamer and artistic performer is revealed through a kind of defining visionary quest and initiatory-transformative experience. Such persons are then able to recognize their special status and spirituality as ecstatic or visionary healers. It is this that marks their alien, or extrahuman, nature. Before being initiated as a shamanic healer for the community, the shaman-to-be is often socially dysfunctional or simply declared crazy. An initiated shaman is in this way someone who channels his or her ongoing

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ecstatic energy and visions in a positive direction for the greater community. Such a person is forever a stranger, whose visions are made public and effective through the expressive and often carnivalesque art of words, images, and actions—as well as through the practice of a kind of stagecraft, circus patter, and repertoire of tricks. Through the imaginative art of performative storytelling and expressive artistic production and ritual engagement, the shaman’s visions become healing messages from other planets. During ecstatic flights to the heavenly and hellish realms, and encounters with spirit entities, dead ancestors, and various kinds of animal helpers (such as, in Finster’s case, the Holy Ghost, Abbie, Elvis, and trickster cheetahs), the shaman sees the signs of sinfulness and sickness in the past and the prophetic possibility of future revival. To shamanize is, consequently, to learn the bodily and mental skills of effectively and therapeutically communicating one’s visionary experience to others. These are essentially ritual and artistic skills that are dramatic and entertaining as well as individually and communally restorative. In the performances of a traditional shaman, the recreational suspension of disbelief in the emotions of wonderment and amazement makes possible a kind of healing re-creation of human life.36 In the face of the temporal flow and ebb of life, this is a healing performance that will take place over and over again. One conclusion to draw is that there is a significant continuity in the use of these techniques, which runs from shamans to evangelical preachers, actors, stand-up comedians, stage magicians, popular musicians, and (yes) selftaught visionaries and artists.37

shamans and the shamanistic From the standpoint of the comparative history of religions, it is especially illuminating to consider Finster’s self-proclaimed master identity as the Man of Visions as shamanistic in nature. This is the persona that roughly constellates all the other personalities assumed by Finster. The category of shaman/shamanism is hotly debated—mostly for implying too much in terms of some essentialist continuity and universality. However, recent work on both prehistoric and tribal cultures has significantly renewed the usefulness of shamanism as a cross-cultural interpretive perspective on the nature and history of visionary specialists and religious experience. There has been an abundance of new scholarship concerning prehistoric tradition that strongly supports the notion of the shaman as a kind of prototypical visionary and artistic specialist at the

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origins of human evolutionary tradition.38 Important in this discussion is the recognition that continuity or similarity does not mean identical or the same. In an evolutionary biological and genomic context, the issue is one of homology, or the sharing of a common ancestral template or structure while being variable in terms of external physical features and function as well as cultural traits. Consider, for example, the deep structural and evolutionary affinity of mammalian hands, avian wings, and amphibious flippers that exists despite their radical difference in appearance and action.39 The cross-cultural similarities and differences among circumpolar shamans, biblical prophets, religious mystics, Pentecostal Christians, spirit mediums, voodoo priests, and other individuals regularly displaying trance states and visionary tendencies should, therefore, be carefully considered, and it seems reasonable to think that there may be some homologous connection or disposition. But the question is not necessarily whether someone in a modern context is a shaman in terms of evolutionary descent or shared genetic structure (and what is known as neoshamanism or New Age shamanism requires special caution). Rather, the issue is whether some significant shamanic or shamanistic traits or patterns can be identified. These shamanistic traits include such things as some initial personal trauma, an initiatory self-transformation, regular visionary experience, crafty technical expertise, and obsessive passion, along with an expressive, mediating, and therapeutic concern for public mythmaking, storytelling, art making, and performative ritual.40 Visionary art ranging from Paleolithic cave paintings to the work of the contemporary artist Howard Finster documents that visual inspiration is often connected with altered, ecstatic, trancelike, or broadly shamanistic states of symbolic or creative consciousness. Special states of visionary experience or inspiration, as kinds of waking dreams, frequently make reference to otherworldly imagery involving flying journeys, in which the visionary often uses some magical device or vehicle capable of overcoming the vast distance between the earthly and celestial planes. These experiences constitute a kind of spirit-journey or rapturous flight into the vastness of the sky, where there are encounters with various strange planetary realms, far distant stars, and glowing heavenly mansions, as well as contact with spiritual, angelic, divine, or other extraterrestrial beings. The sky traveler returns to the mundane realm transformed—that is, an initiate into the cosmic structures and healing secrets of dead ancestors and spirits inhabiting other higher and more perfect celestial

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worlds. This traveler among the astronomical spheres is led to realize his or her own extraterrestrial status and is compelled to share some of the heavenly secrets with those who remain earthbound. It is the artistic expression and sharing of these experiences—the dramatic retelling, imaginative re-presentation, and ritual enactment of the otherworldly journey—that empower, amaze, and energize others. The celestial traveler and visionary artist is someone, therefore, who brings the inspiration of prophetic hope and light to all those who are receptive to the heavenly message but are themselves incapable of flight beyond the apocalyptic darkness of this earthly world.41 The case to be made here is not that Finster was a shaman. He was not. A shaman is after all a particular culturally conditioned typology found ethnographically among different circumpolar hunting and gathering tribal groups. Finster was, first, an eccentric Baptist preacher/odd job man/painter who shared certain analogous similitudes, or family resemblances, with traditional therapeutic technicians of ecstasy and salesmanship often called shamans. Therefore, I do assert that the adjectival concept of a shamanistic type of person who frequently has waking dreams and enters into trance states, has intense visionary experiences, and effectively, artistically, and therapeutically shares those dreams and visions with a larger public can be legitimately used as a meaningful interpretive construct. Such an interpretive strategy has the metaphoric power of any useful comparative observation, in that it describes something general, common, familial, or homologous, yet often hidden or not fully appreciated, about certain kinds of exceptionally creative and artistic individuals. In this way, Finster’s shamanistic form of visionary and evangelical outsiderism points toward the complex interconnections of religious ecstasy, artistic creation, mental abnormality, cultural deprivation, social marginality, and obsessive behavior.

like a tv screen rollin’ Finster’s visionary persona not only was a key aspect of his overall narrative but also was at the very heart of his interplanetary strangeness, restless industry, and creative energy. As a matter of fact, Finster actually has given us, in his interview by Kirwin, his own theory of visionary experience.42 He begins by alluding to one of his favorite biblical prooftexts (Hosea 12:10) that, like other biblical verses, refers to the prophetic “multiplication” of visions. Finster at first cogently suggests this

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passage implies that “anybody’s liable to start havin’ visions,” but he quickly moves on to a description of his own experiences, which are truly extraordinary. He says that a “whole big book” of visions (alluding to Howard Finsters Vision of 1982) would “run across [his] eyeballs in a few minutes.” This story is the basis for his memorable thoughtcard description of himself as his “own T.V.,” in which he tells us that while resting on a bed that his children often played on he suddenly had a vision come upon him “like a TV screen rollin’.” This abrupt rush of images—quite terrible and frightening at first— came at him pell-mell, and he “even forgot where [he] was or who [he] was or what [he] was here for.” He indicates that things “sorta died down” after that, and he was able to come back to his senses and “tell who [he] was again.” Referring to the special intensity of these visionary experiences, Finster goes on to describe how Howard Finsters Vision of 1982 came to him on his internal television, and that he wrote it out and drew it in a frenzied five-day period, something he could never have done if he had been “studying up a book to write.” Having a vision, he affirms, is a totally different kind of experience, one that somehow opened up and accelerated the “gigantic warehouse” of his brain. In the early 1980s, John F. Turner on several occasions witnessed Finster in a trance state. One of these was while Finster was staying at Turner’s house in Berkeley in 1981. Finster suddenly drifted off for a relatively short period with his eyes closed. This appeared to Turner as a kind of “visual cat nap” that ended as abruptly as it began and led to Finster blurting out “something like ‘John, I just was traveling in outer space and had these visions.’ ”43 At another time, when Turner was with Finster in the Mirror House in Paradise Garden and both of them were “shooting the bull,” Finster fell into a trance state “for fifteen seconds or so.” Then his eyes opened, and, visibly refreshed, he proceeded to tell Turner that he had been flying in space, at which point he started to rattle off the various planets he had seen.44 We actually have a visual record of this trance experience, since Turner, who had his camera that day, was able to take a remarkable photograph (figure 15).45

ecstatic vision and celestial flight Finster’s rolling-TV-screen reflections on his visionary experience and his artistic work draw upon biblical prophecy and evangelical theology of the last days. But shamanistically, as seen in his artwork and John F. Turner’s testimony, his visions also make use of otherworldly imagery

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figure 15. Finster in a trance, c. early 1980s. John F. Turner Collection. © Photograph by John F. Turner.

involving quirky forms of celestial travel and heavenly rapture not sanctioned by the Christian scriptures. Finster provides us with a truly fascinating, anthropologically significant, and often slyly humorous case study in the blurred and interactive relation between experience and expression, schematically perceived reality and imagined fabulation, inspirational memories and artistic creativity, life and art. The basic issue has to do with the mediated or perspectival nature of human experience (“I am my own T.V.”) and the always moot “inspirational” relationship between an external reality (this earth planet and sky) and the made-up worlds, other imaginative planets, or artistic productions that define human cultural life. The question of the relation between visionary inspiration and artistic expression as related to shamans, mystics, or visionary artists is simultaneously allusive (in that the causal sequence is never clear, direct, or congruent) and illusive (in that it is always rooted in a kind of imaginative construct or fictive projection).46 Accounts of vision, ecstasy, and celestial travel display a certain kind of shamanistic initiatory pattern. Thus the lives of self-taught visionary artists like Finster often involve the occurrence of some significant psychic or physical trauma that decisively and unexpectedly leads to visionary experiences resulting in obsessive, self-taught artistic activities or

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compulsive environmental constructions or both. Analogously, it should be noted, traditional shamans within the context of the comparative history of religions are psychological outsiders within their own tribal communities by virtue of some overwhelming psychotic upheaval that initially alienates them from ordinary communal life. Becoming a shaman consequently involves the resolution of this wounded condition through the shaman’s mastery of ecstatic states associated with a transformative initiatory journey, or vision quest, within the heavens. This in turn leads to the ability to productively “heal” others by the shamanizing activities of ecstatic “magical flight,” performative storytelling, and artistic expression. Shamans are, therefore, wounded healers, technicians of trance, applied visionaries, and strangers from another world whose therapeutic value is directly related to their ability to artistically share the ecstatic visions of celestial flight with the larger community. The metaphorical lineage of the wounded healer connects Finster not only to the shaman but also to the tribal trickster-blacksmith, prophetic visionary, messianic hero, medieval mystic, renaissance magus, and contemporary psychotherapist.47 They all have a conjoined religious and artistic ability to heal themselves and to make their mythic visions real and therapeutic for others. By allowing us to aesthetically encounter, ritually enter into, and imaginatively inhabit, their strange productions, they playfully grant us the saving boon of reviving our spirits and renewing our wonderment at, and our commitment to, the infinite possibilities of human creativity and community. It is important to distinguish the general narrative pattern of the otherworldly or celestial journey, along with a cluster of recurrent shamanistic images in Finster’s work as a “rustic astronaut of the spirit world.”48 These images, many of which are observed in Howard Finsters Vision of 1982, involve such themes as an initiatory death and rebirth, which sometimes involves a kind of dematerialization or x-ray skeletization; ecstatic flight to both infernal and celestial realms; the passage through different hierarchically arranged cosmological levels or domains; and the visitation and exploration of strange astral worlds and shining planets. Witnessed also in these accounts are various types of light, number, and color imagery; the presence of certain spirit beings and heavenly helpers; the encounter with dead ancestors and ancestral heroes; and the revelation of messages relevant to those left back on earth.49 Finster said that, as a child growing up among twelve other siblings on an impoverished farm in northern Alabama, he spent “a lot of time on [the] front porch watching for shooting stars,” and that every once in

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a while he would be thrilled to see a comet flash through the night sky. He associated these experiences with dreams about traveling in outer space, and the first spaceships he ever saw were the baroque rocket ships depicted in the Buck Rogers (and most likely the Flash Gordon) comic books. This kind of vessel would graphically reappear as the Gladonia Super Angel in Howard Finsters Vision of 1982.50 But there was something more here than nighttime reveries and dreamy reflections about boyish adventures in cartoon rocket ships. He explained that at a very early age he gradually became aware of another kind of powerful experience that involved a uniquely intense way of “seeing things never seen before.” He realized that his gift for a special kind of inner vision could not be completely identified with either his nocturnal dreams or his nightly musing.51 In later life, he always emphasized that his first visionary experience occurred at the age of three, when, while out fearfully looking for his mother in the fields next to the family farm, he suddenly saw his dead sister, Abbie Rose, as a glowing angelic figure in a crystalline sky on a celestial escalator or, as he would show in a painting, clutching at a kind of heavenly ladder. She was trying to communicate something, but only later did he realize what she wanted to tell him. As Finster came to interpret this memory retrospectively, Abbie’s unstated message was simply: “Howard, you’re gonna be a man of visions.”52 One important painting of this incident dates to 1982 (a year that on this work he mysteriously calls a “great year of changes”) and is a striking example of his evolution as a self-taught visionary artist (Howard Looks Upon a Piece of Planet, painting no. 2297; plate 6). In this work, as in other works of the early and mid-1980s, he has impressively linked his lifelong craftsmanship (the pyrographically embossed frame) with his newfound painterly technique and overall visual composition: the beautiful blue-and-glitter lattice work of cosmic spheres that surrounds a visionary lens depicting a gated heavenly realm with green fields, delicate blooming trees, tiered mansions, and angels. Also depicted is the visionary ladder and a white-suited Finster beckoning with open arms to the “piece of planet” and a blue sky streaked with clouds and multiple flying angels. Below this figure and reaching up to Finster is Abbie, shown as a winged angel dressed in a pink gown. This vision made visible to others as an artwork was specifically called “strange” by Finster himself, and the long inscription on the lower left side of the central lens outlines in some detail Finster’s evangelical interpretation of his ecstatic ability to visit other worlds. Finster indicates that if it were his physical body that went “out into space,” there would

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be no “story” or painting. What “goes out” is his “Second Adam” or “quickening spirit” that is manifest in the “seven invisible members” of the Holy Ghost—that is, the spiritual faculties of seeing, hearing, feeling, memory, smelling, taste, and voice. This soul-like entity is seemingly shown in the painting by the oddly incongruous image of a lenslike eye floating within the “piece of planet,” among its heavenly mansions. It is this spiritual eye of vision that goes “out of [Finster’s] body” to a place many “light years away” and then returns with the “facts” and “stories” of these visitations. The formative significance of this childhood experience is suggested by Finster’s subsequent affirmation that this vision certainly “wasn’t no dream nor no illusion.” Rather, his vision of Abbie Rose “would live with him all his life.” As he said, this was his “basic vision of all visions.” In an occult way, which he recognized only later, his life as a visionary artist was seemingly prefigured and predetermined by this event: “It was the foundation for my visions, and it stabilizes all my visions. It’s the hard rock o’ my faith in my visions—my vision to build a garden, and my vision that I lived another life someplace else before I came to this world, and ever’thing else.”53 Discussing this event some sixty years later, when he had fully— although somewhat reluctantly at first—embraced his artistic vocation as a cosmic stranger and the Man of Visions, Finster emphasized again that this kind of visionary experience was notably different from ordinary nighttime dreams. One important distinction was that, as he said, “dreams’re always somethin’ that I’ve seen before, or somethin’ that’s familiar. But a vision’s somethin’ that comes to you that you never thought on before. It’s somethin’ nobody ever seen before.”54 He said also that whereas his dreams came to him only while he slept, his trancelike reveries and visions could unexpectedly come at any time while he was awake or asleep. These visions were unusually vivid and memorable in a way that his dreams were not. As indicated earlier, Finster loved to liken his visions to a kind of internal TV broadcast. In this sense, he memorably explained, his mind functioned like a TV set “picking up visions all through the night hours of darkness.” “From the thin air,” he declared, visionary pictures come to him “over a pattern wave beyond the light of the sun.”55 For Finster, there was a pressing need to share such strange sights and pictures with others, whereas his dreams were mostly forgettable and private. His visionary credo was a special kind of intense seeing that most often involved an otherworldly journey. This involved passing up into the sky or, sometimes, traveling down to the infernal regions to

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meet the damned (as in his memorable encounter with Hitler).56 He declared: “In my visions I go to places that aren’t like anything on this world. I don’t know where they are, but they’re in some kinda other worlds. I’m there, and then when I come out o’ the vision, I’m wherever I was when I started. And after I have a vision and see it, then’s when I think on it. And after I think on it, I tell it. And the rest is up to the people. They can do what they want with my visions.”57 Directly related to these early visionary experiences and his later career as a visionary painter is Finster’s frequent emphasis on the “warm feelings” he had about these visions and the fact that throughout his life he often had both dreams and visions of flying. He related these aeronautical proclivities to a childhood fear of falling, which forced him to master the visionary ability to fly. As he said, when he started flying he no longer had “to worry ‘bout fallin’ offa the house, or fallin’ offa anything.” He indicated that he quickly developed a proficiency in visionary flying that continued throughout his later life and transformed his fear into a kind of exhilaration and freedom. Whenever he felt frightened about falling in his visions or dreams, he’d “just take a big breath and just start off flyin’.” He went on to say, “All I had to do was want to. And I flied all over the yard, over the house. I had visions o’ just sweepin’ over big trees and goin’ down whole valleys, and ever’thing flyin’ under me just like an airplane.” He became so adept in these visionary flights that he was able to “make swift dips like some shooting bird,” and his earthbound friends would watch him swooping through the sky as if he were putting on some kind of amazing “air show.”58 For all his incredible ability to fly in exciting “loops and leaps,” Finster was always sophisticated enough to recognize that his “mind and spirit was what really was flying.”59 At the same time, the lucidity and vitality of these visions of flight, and his swooping voyages to other worlds, made Finster—very much in the visionary spirit of William Blake—question what was really real. “When I was flying,” he said, “I was enjoying it as much as if I had been in my body.” The intensity of his visions was such that when his mind was in space, his body remained inert and “dead” until he returned. Echoing both the themes of shamanic trance-induced flight, accounts of near-death experiences, and occult out-of-body or astral-travel experiences, Finster declared that when he was flying in space, he remembered nothing about his fleshy body. He felt buoyant, enlightened, and empowered. As he put it, “I feel transparent, have light speed, and my accuracy is perfect.”60 One memorable story regarding out-of-body experiences involved Finster jumping

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back into his body when the phone rang in his studio. He explained to the collector and confidant Jim Arient that “his spirit was hovering up on the ceiling” marveling at “his physical being” painting a picture.61 Another formative event in Finster’s early life, and one that significantly relates to his later, quasi-shamanistic career as a visionary “extraterrestrial Baptist,”62 is his evangelical conversion or born-again experience. He was thirteen at the time of his religious conversion, and this was the last time he would formally go to school. While attending a revival meeting in his old schoolhouse at Violet Hill, he suddenly felt the overwhelming presence of God in his body. He said that “God just got a hold o’ me and wouldn’t turn me loose!” Somewhat like the “warm feelin’s” he got when he had visions, he stated, he felt a “new feelin’” come into him, a “Holy Ghost feelin’,” and he knew at that moment that he was a “new person” who had been “borned again”—a condition that he loudly announced to the congregation by walking back and forth on the prayer benches and hoarsely shouting out his salvation. He reported that, immediately after this experience, and while basking in the warm afterglow of the Holy Ghost, he ran from the revival meeting and felt compelled to look up at the night sky, where he blissfully gazed upon the stars in the heavens. He knew then that they were bright signs of God’s power and glory, and he had “never seen [the stars] look so beautiful.”63 Everything on the earth and in the sky had changed, and he felt ready to go out into the world and preach God’s word to all who would listen.64 It is worth recalling some classic ruminations of the famous American philosopher William James on the connection between the inner transformation associated with mystic, visionary, or conversion experience and the enhancement or coloration of our perceptions of the outer world.65 As James noticed in relation to the conversion experience of the influential Puritan Jonathan Edwards, the inner feelings of conversion or mystic experience tend to “spill over” and saturate the natural landscape “with beauty, light, newness, vitality, and harmony.” Nature itself—the whole landscape of life and the starry night—is transformed by the visionary experience.

howard finsters vision of 1982 Finster’s most important and prolonged narrative presentation of his visionary experience as an evangelical cosmonaut is the curiously enchanting and at times quaintly humorous self-published book called Howard Finsters Vision of 1982, a work that carries the additional title

figure 16. Cover of Howard Finsters Vision of 1982, 1982. Self-printed booklet, 9.5 x 7.25 inches. Artwork no. 2474. Girardot/LaBelle Collection. Photograph by Steven Lichak. © Finster Estate.

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of Vision of 200 Light Years Away. Space Born of Three Generations. From Earth to the Heaven of Heavens (figure 16). As he describes it, this work—no. “2000 and 474” in Finster’s special numbering system—was frenetically and sleeplessly written out, and it included “one hundred pages of worlds and wonders of art and design patterns to choose from.” Even better was that it was also, as he announced on the cover, “your own book to color.”66 The contents of the book include an astounding hodgepodge of material. The core of the book is the eighty-seven-page story of Finster’s vision of an incredible voyage among celestial worlds on the “130 ton” Buck Rogers–style, or Flash Gordon–style, Gladonia Super Angel spaceship. This wild specimen of evangelical science fiction is punctuated by patches of homespun poetry and intriguingly distorted imagery. It vividly recapitulates symbolic themes seen throughout the history of visionary literature dealing with otherworldly journeys, particularly accounts of shamanistic initiatory flights to the heavens. This extended visionary experience, and its narrative and artistic expression in this self-produced book, constitutes a kind of cartoon consummation of Finster’s destiny as the Man of Visions. Somewhat as in the case of his earlier Christian conversion as a young man, Finster was twice born-yet-again in the expanded visionary experiences expressed in his art and in Howard Finsters Vision of 1982. His visionary experiences reached a crescendo of intensity in 1982, a situation that perhaps explains Finster’s cryptic comment on his Abbie-Rosevision painting of the same year, where it is said that 1982 was a “great year of changes.” For Finster the world was no longer the same, since he had now publicly identified himself with his otherworldly heritage. Equally interesting—in the manner of William Blake’s work as a visionary poet and graphic engraver—is that Finster’s story revels in the juxtaposition of words, images, and overall design in the compulsive spirit of horror vacui. This work is, therefore, a kind of early graphic novel meticulously hand lettered in his characteristic spellings, with every bit of available space filled to overflowing. Each page is almost a separate work of handmade art, composed of complex latticework designs; intricate and endlessly varied abstract patterns; diverse, geometrically drawn borders; and various crude, cartoonlike images. All of this was done in bold black and white, a kind of rough-hewn, visionary coloring book. To round out the promised one hundred pages of the book, Finster encased his visionary story within a wonderfully cluttered, pasted collage of newspaper clippings and assorted photos (pictures of himself,

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his family, and his growing group of friends attracted to his artistic strangeness).67 Howard Finsters Vision of 1982 is a masterwork by a self-taught designer and a fascinating record of contemporary visionary experience. It appears generally to be an elaborate version of the frequent rollingTV-screen visions about visiting other worlds that he was having at this time.68 In its basic outline, the story begins with Howard Finster and his wife, along with his friend J. B. White and his wife, flying in the Gladonia Super Angel into outer space, all the while dropping “sadalites” (satellites) out of their mother ship so that they can send edifying broadcasts and pictures back to people and “sintists” (scientists) on earth.69 These two pioneering space husbands then discover that their wives are “pragnet” (pregnant) and rejoice in the fact that, since there’s “no cheatin’ in outer space,” they know that the children are really theirs. This second generation is born on the ship—that is, White’s daughter, named Spacey, and Finster’s son, Firelite. At this point in the voyage, the families are preoccupied with various domestic chores (such as space diapering and garbage disposal), and their ship starts to speed up as it races many light-years away from earth. Finster then performs “holy matromona” (matrimony) for the children, Spacey and Firelite, who have grown up unusually fast. Eventually the Whites die and Finster’s wife, too, dies, all of them receiving special space funerals. People on earth are amazed by the reports being sent back by the space travelers. Even the mystery of the UFOs is revealed to “every nation on earth” as the Space Angel visits other alien worlds. Equally exciting to the voyagers is the realization that atheists on earth are rapidly becoming believers, and scientists and professors are no longer teaching that people came from monkeys. Portents of even more radical change are subsequently indicated by the ship’s frightening entry into a realm of hazy darkness, which, after many hours, gives way to myriad strange planets and shining stars. At this time a third generation is born in space. Named Farson and Longfellow, these two boys must resign themselves to the fact that they will be the last generation on this trip. Communication with the earth grows weaker, and as the dented and pitted ship starts to vibrate, Finster himself finally dies and is given a proper space burial. More than a hundred light-years away now, the two brothers in space try to make the best of their situation, but they feel the ship speeding out of control. The brothers’ parents, Firelite (or Starlite, as he is called on p. 44) and Spacey, die, and their bodies glow like neon lights when ejected from the ship.

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This is taken as a sign that they have achieved some kind of special enlightened or spiritual condition. The dilapidated ship now mysteriously comes to a stop over a large planet called Snausero, and the brothers descend to explore this curious world. Snausero is a world that knows the secrets of the UFOs and is entirely covered with nine-foot-tall grass. It is inhabited by a benign people who consume only the pure pollen of the tall grass, clothe themselves with their own long hair, and travel all over their world by means of peculiar levitating devices and bubble craft. After leaving this unusual world, the brothers pass by a series of increasingly more fantastic, glowing worlds of crystal, gold, and light—all of which are populated by technologically advanced and morally benevolent beings. Approaching two hundred light-years from home, Farson and Longfellow finally feel their faithful ship disappearing around them. It seems to blow away like dust, leaving only their podlike cockpit. At this time, and in the shamanistic sense of a final, initiatory “skeletization,” the bodies of the two brothers, still sitting in the cockpit, dissolve down to their bones and, as the story says, they became “two skulls” gauntly looking out into deepest space.70 As they plunge into the “heaven of heavens,” the narrative, after seventy-some pages of distinctly unorthodox imagery, abruptly becomes more conventionally Christian, Protestant, evangelical, and biblical. A giant glowing Jesus appears by a shining gate, and suddenly the brothers are reunited with their parents and with the Whites and Finsters. Jesus assures the brothers that they have reached the vicinity of the heaven of heavens, where all who have passed the test of life and have completed their own celestial journey can meet once again with their previously departed loved ones. They have attained a kind of celestial way station, which is called the First Heaven of Rest, a place where there is no pain and suffering. Moses then replaces Jesus and introduces the reunited three generations to the apostle Paul, who serves as God’s penultimate agent. Paul gives a theological dissertation on evangelical ideas about the Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead, and the work of establishing once and for all the final glory of heaven. Paul’s talk is then cut short by the introduction, in the last seven pages, of Finster’s own back-from-the-dead reappearance. He triumphantly declares that “this is the vision of Howard Finster and without a vision the people will perish so saith the Bible.”71 At the end of the book, Finster is acting as God’s spokesman, part of the prophetic lineage of Paul, Moses, and Jesus himself—as well as part of the lineage of other heroic heavenly voyagers and saviors from many other cultural traditions. We are given a folksy sermonette on the differ-

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ence between the Old and New Testaments; our angelic destiny, where there will be no division into male and female genders; and Finster’s own theological metaphysics, wherein he “proves” the existence of God in relation to such seeming mysteries as the divine invisibility of TV broadcasts and the power of electricity. The story ends with Finster’s words of admonishment: “My vision is that in the New Heaven, we will never again remember that we was on the war toren earth planet. Or ever existed in it. It will be forgotten and as if it had never been. Then we live.”72

a visionary coloring book Howard Finsters Vision of 1982 can be fully savored only in Finster’s original hand-drawn and self-published form. But like the artistic elements and the obsessive design and layout of this work, the general thematic imagery and symbolic content of the story suggest it is something more than a naive coloring book. For all its rough simplicity, fractured spelling, innocent whimsy, rustic poetry, and final biblical sentimentality, there is an authentic visionary energy and raw allure in much of the narrative, which evokes the ecstatic power of shamanistic visions involving otherworldly journeys. One implication is simply that visionary experience has its own experiential and cognitive integrity that cannot be easily reduced to, or dismissed as, dysfunctional psychotic disease or hallucinatory nonsense. At the very least, the record of visionary experience embedded throughout the history of religions and art displays a surprisingly common imaginative structure involving spirit travel among strange celestial worlds. Visionary visitations to other planets, and their artistic expression in word and image, seem primarily related to how the human engagement with—experience, perception, and understanding of—the world is always mediated, conditioned, or filtered by the creative or mythic imagination. Visionary experience and art is in this way mostly a fabulation, a “seeing” of or visionary voyage among the multiple worlds of meaning that define the earthly and heavenly poles of human existence. It is because of these vividly imagined, and often celestial, other worlds visited by, reported on, and visually depicted by specially gifted religious and artistic travelers that we are able to live in, and go bravely forward in, the temporal flux, material conditions, cultural matrix, and gravid bodily forms given to us. As the philosopher George Santayana said, “Having another world to live in” may be the “very meaning” of religion—and I add: of

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art as well.73 Believing is seeing.74 And vision is virtue on the planet of Snausero as well as on what Finster called this “earth planet.” Without new visions, cultures die and the people perish. Rather than necessarily leading to the socially destructive behavior of schizophrenic madness, visionary experience in the best sense is, or can be, aesthetically productive of both individual creativity and communal regeneration. The “chief virtue” of the human “tendency to conceive of other worlds” in relation to flight, celestial beings, and heavenly realms may well be “that it provides us a sense of orientation in this world, through which we would otherwise wander without direction.”75 Furthermore, “in visionary literature” this perceptive orientation, or mapping of an infinite cosmos of meaning, “is accomplished by sending scouts to visit the farther reaches and return with eyewitness accounts that imaginatively appropriate the current world-picture. Without such reports of actual experience, we seem to live in an unevaluated and desacralized universe.”76 This realization recalls, of course, the ironic truth of the notorious general imaginative principle of the nineteenth-century literary pundit Oscar Wilde, that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”77 Finster’s visionary experience most commonly seems to move from otherworldly images—imaginary cartoon planets like Snausero and the evangelical heaven of heavens, biblical ancestors like Moses and Noah, comic-strip spaceships, dead celebrity-saints like Elvis, and mandalalike UFOs from the movies—back to this earth planet.78 Moreover, his visionary testimony at other times and places leads to the strong suspicion that this imaginative principle, which moves from art to life and back again, is at the heart of our overall perception of the cultural and natural worlds. Finster’s rough-hewn coloring book of interplanetary travel ends up potentially coloring the awareness of our own inner lives and the outer world. To borrow again from William James, it may be said that Finster’s visionary cartoon book can potentially give a rainbow and comic glow to our lives—as long as we have the courage to recognize such visionary works as signs with messages. As Finster said at the end of Howard Finsters Vision of 1982: “Then we live.”

chapter 6

Snakes in the Garden Life and Death in Paradise

I built this park of broken pieces to try to mend a broken world of people who are traveling their last road. —Howard Finster

At the theological and experiential center of [the Folk Art Church and Paradise Garden] is human creativity. . . . Creativity itself is the image of God. The human form divine, as William Blake put it. Imago dei: the art act. —Timothy K. Beal

And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. —Genesis 3:14

on the garden planet Howard Finster’s ever-evolving assemblage of stories and art—created between the early 1960s and his death—occurred within, and in constant reference to, a particular physical place on this planet. This was (to use Finster’s words) “one city block” of scrubby, waterlogged land; rundown houses; and proud, though mostly poor, people, in Pennville, Georgia, a place that was first called the Pine Springs Museum.1 Eventually, and more or less by happy accident, this is the environment that became the more biblically and mythically resonant Paradise Garden

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1. Studio 2. Woodshop 3. Storage room (formerly recording studio) 4. Display room 5. Workshop 6. Home/studio 7. Glue Tower 8. World's Folk Art Church 9. Concrete busts 10. Garage/painted Cadillac 11. Dog pen 12. Small Bicycle Tower 13. ''Noah's Barnyard" 14. Bicycle Tower 15. National Rose Tower 16. Bunk House 17. Concrete "Giant's Shoe" 18. Angel 19. Tomb of the "Unknown Body" 20. Shoe Room 21. Exhibition Gallery 22. Painted refrigerator 23. Location where Howard had the vision to "paint sacred art" 24. Display building (formerly bike shop and television repair shop) 25. First concrete wall (embedded with artifacts) 26. Bible House

figure 17. Jose Tavel, Paradise Garden, map and legend, part 1, 1988. Reproduced from Turner, Man of Visions, pp. 62–63. © Jose E. Tavel, AIA.

(see figures 17 and 18).2 Aspects of this improbable fantasyland have appeared throughout this work, but let me again emphasize how important this organically living—always dynamically and improbably expanding—environment was for Finster. No single portrayal can do it justice, since the Garden was the embodied manifestation of Finster’s

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27. "Coin Man" 28. Display building (inventions of mankind) 29. "Serpent of the Wilderness" 30. Self-watering planters 31. "Little River of Jordan" 32. Concrete sidewalks (embedded with artifacts) 33. Concrete "Lion with the Lamb" 34. Honeycomb Mountain 35. Coca-Cola Bottle Pump House 36. Photographer's stand 37. Windmill 38. Animal pen 39. Cement "Mother and Child" 40. Original entrance to Paradise Garden 41. Howard's first home and studio 42. Solar room 43. Haul shed (first piece in garden) 44. Wire "Display Tower" 45. Storage shed and rabbit hutch

figure 18. Jose Tavel, Paradise Garden, map and legend, part 2, 1988. Reproduced from Turner, Man of Visions, pp. 62–63. © Jose E. Tavel, AIA.

entire life up to the time of the 1960s and, ever afterward, the artistic armature for his identity as the visionary Stranger from Another World. The Garden was—and still is, at least to some degree—an untamed environmental amalgamation and a roadside attraction of oddities (as well as a depleted collection of the inventions of humankind) vaguely

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harkening back to Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum and the nearby Rock City. It was a refreshing oasis of lush plants, streams, walkways, fruit, and animals created in defiance of the humid heat and wild rot of Southern life and, simultaneously, a luxuriant repository of biblical signage and self-aggrandizement. Finally it was also a kind of outdoor artist’s studio for Finster’s ongoing experiments involving self-referential and admonitory artworks, plywood cutouts, junk assemblages, and embedded concrete structures. He expanded this environment in large and small ways to the end of his days, even during the 1990s, when he no longer lived in the Garden, preferring instead his fortress-of-solitude-like home several miles away in one of the better sections of Summerville. The World’s Folk Art Church, which was started in the early 1980s and mostly finished by 1985, was the symbolic heart of the Garden and an extraordinary embodiment of Finster’s makeshift visionary approach to architecture.3 Despite various health problems, Finster was constantly adding his and others’ artworks, as well as much larger architectural structures, like the elevated rolling-chair gallery running through the middle of the Garden. When the dangerously rickety Folk Art Church was no longer useable, this new gallery served as a kind of linear chapel and repository for other people’s art inspired by the old Man of Visions. There were other, later structures, such as the twin Greek-columned templelike building that was used to display larger artworks (e.g., at one time, the giant, painted Coke bottle). Another of these later structures was the small, nondescript chapel that at first housed a coffin that became a portent of Finster’s impending death.4 For a while, there was even a sign in this chapel that announced Finster’s desire to be “creamenated” (a word Finster spelled in multiple ways) when he died. His coffin on display in the chapel was, therefore, only an extralarge container for his cremated ashes. As he said, “God would not let Jesus see corruption. God would not let Jesus rot in his grave and stink as carion. . . . I want to be like Jesus free from corruption. Take my body when I die. Creamaneate it into my casket, and set my casket in Parodise Garden where my works are.” In this way, Finster tells us that he will be present for “his friends.” He’ll be invisible like God is, but “spiritually” present and waiting for all of us. He “will be talking” to us from beyond the grave, or in this case beyond the coffin.5 The scandal of this fervent aspiration for cremation is that it went too much against the grain of conventional religious mores in north Georgia. The coffin in the chapel eventually became—especially because of prompting by Finster’s wife, Pauline—merely a symbolic receptacle

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for his decaying flesh and bony remains. No fiery spiritualization or pure ashes! This final capitulation to traditional evangelical sentiments was further compounded by his post-9/11 death in October 2001. At first, he was buried (though not in his cremation coffin) and memorialized in a cemetery plot next to the Silver Hill Baptist Church, not far from Summerville, one of the last churches where Finster had preached. Eight years later, however, he was—again because of the strong wishes of Pauline—disinterred and reburied in the old family Head Springs graveyard close to Valley Head, Alabama.6 In May 2013, Pauline was buried alongside her husband and close to Abbie’s grave in the Head Springs cemetery. Finster’s Garden became another alternative planet on this earth planet, a self-contained world that re-created the biblical Eden as well as many other fabled paradise lands found in cultures throughout the world. Paradise Garden was in this way a mythic world—a threedimensional symbol and sign of what is other to our fallen world. Most of all, it was an actual physical place available to everyone, a revelatory location that allowed for the possibility of personal re-creation (in the sense of a renewed creation or revival of one’s feelings about the world) and the certainty of recreation. It was truly a real and imaginary “other world” from which all people, along with Finster, came and to which all will go back when they die. The nostalgic difficulty for most of us was that the existence of this other world depended on the potent art of a crafty sojourner to our current broken world.

the myth of the garden The Garden was the locus of creation and visionary experience for Finster, as well as the generative matrix for much of his overall mythos. The multiple avatars that populated the myth (prophet, stranger, Man of Visions, and especially the Second Adam) in the final telling of the story all depended, therefore, on the existence of the Garden. It was in this sense the spine for everything else. Now the myth of the garden goes something like this: Born again in the Lord’s work when he was only in his teens, and having already had a visionary premonition of his final destiny, Howard Finster busily lived a hard and full life for fortysome years. Although the narrative becomes garbled at this point, it was in the early 1960s, while dealing with various hardships, living in Pennville, and pastoring at the Chelsea Baptist Church in Menlo, Georgia, that Finster had a mighty Holy Ghost feeling and various visionary

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encounters. The most important of these encounters seems to have been his vision of a ten- or fifteen-foot-tall giant man who indicated he should “get on the altar” and build a special kind of museum and garden.7 To Johnny Carson, Finster described these special feelings as akin to knowing exactly where to scratch an itch. I think, however, that Jonathan Williams, poet and founder of the eccentric publishing house the Jargon Society, best captured some of the incongruous mystery and humor of Finster’s improbable creation of Paradise Garden. In the relentlessly rhymed bit of inspired doggerel called “a rhyme for howard finster about how it all began in the country near lookout,” Williams says, I thought at first of swarms of bees . . . but, sure enough, it was God Who was shooting the breeze, looking about in this here grove of red trees, Who said to Howard (down there on his knees), “Howard, your warm arm, please, what we need down here is a man who ‘sees’ the glory stored in breeze and trees and what art there is in words to bring folks ease.” Swarm for the Lord like bees! Sing like honey on its knees!8

Finster, not surprisingly, really loved the rhyme, which ran all the way down the poem and onto his knees. And he was certainly as busy as a whole hive of live bees. But an understanding of exactly what these feelings and swarming urges meant came only in the gradual and arduous building of the garden, which was accompanied from the 1960s through the 1990s by arresting, otherworldly visions that rushed into him like rollin’ TV broadcasts. Initially his passion to construct something on a heroic scale was viewed by his neighbors and his family (notably Pauline) as an ill-conceived and foolish project. Striking a bargain with his wife and relegating his efforts at first to the watery land immediately behind his house, Finster began his herculean labors. For the next decade and a half, Finster obsessively worked at transforming the recalcitrant land into the likeness of his evolving visionary dreamscape, work that he accomplished while intermittently preaching and working at various jobs. By the mid-1970s, his flamboyant yard work had expanded into the bizarrely provocative environmental artwork called Pine Springs Museum, then the Plant Farm Museum, and eventually Paradise Garden. Still living in his original Pennville house at the southeast corner of the Garden, Finster then had his fabled finger-

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face vision that led to his definitive vocation as a visionary stranger commissioned to paint sacred art. By this time, he had been feverishly making all kinds of recycled craft-art and scriptural signage. The Garden was the most dramatic example of these efforts, since it was already filled with numerous hand-painted signs and cutout placards with both biblical and popular sayings. After 1976, something changed. While still working on the Garden, and while still always painting signs, Finster was inflamed with visionary passion and his emphasis shifted to more portable and commercial forms of painted works that creatively transformed prophetic images and words into otherworldly messages that collapsed any possible distinction between sacred and profane, art and junk. This shift was certainly related to the fact that he was undergoing an upsurge of visionary experience, but it is also true that at this time he was being discovered by the national media and would, in the 1970s and early 1980s, very quickly acquire his first major dealers and promoters, Jeffrey and Jane Camp of the American Folk Art Company of Tappahannock, Virginia.9 Phyllis Kind came somewhat later, in the 1980s. Victor Faccinto, an artist-filmmaker at Wake Forrest University, and Andy Nasisse, a ceramic artist and sculptor at the University of Georgia, were other early supporters, as was the peripatetic and passionate dentist-collectorenthusiast Jim Arient. Others in the mid-1980s included a ceramicist and dealer in Atlanta, Rick Berman; the Philadelphia dealers Janet Fleisher and John Ollman; and the New York dealers Sherry Cavin and Randall Morris. John F. Turner, a TV person from Berkeley who had been avidly documenting art environments, had happened upon Finster in the mid-1970s; and in the early 1980s he quickly became both a longterm confidant and Finster’s first serious amanuensis.10 Others who came into the swirl of the Finster world in the 1980s were the alternative rock bands R.E.M. and the Talking Heads and the writer Tom Patterson. Both Turner and Patterson produced books in 1989 that gave Finster even more of a national audience and a powerful aura as an “authentic” folk, primitive, self-taught, and visionary outsider. With this kind of recognition, along with numerous solo and group shows, there was an increasingly insistent demand for Finster’s artworks, signs, and almost anything else that he had touched and signed. Given the need to keep up with the clamor for his work—especially for his various popular and affordable hits (angels, Elvis, cheetahs, Coke bottles, and so on)—he started to mass-produce cutouts in a quasi-assembly-line fashion, where some of the grandkids prepared and primed the

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plywood templates. Finster, however, always continued to put the finishing touches on these works, although by the end of the 1980s he had started to use Sharpies and paint pens instead of his earlier brushes and tractor enamel. It was still, of course, a matter of getting the message out to the world beyond north Georgia, and now it was truly the case that much of the world was paying attention. And paying good money too. The rest of the story is history. As the stories were generated and they coalesced, Finster painted, performed, and promulgated them in his garden of creation, and so they became real for a worldwide audience. Finster had the charisma and power to make his visions and his art arresting for those who encountered his funky paradise world. Visiting the Garden when it was still under the care and living spirit of its creator, and purchasing a painted cutout relic of this bizarre land, may or may not have been an experience that forever changed one’s life, and for some the place was simply an odd junkyard filled with crudely painted signs and images. But whether you were amazed or chagrined by the rude yet stimulating strangeness of the Garden and the art, you could not help but be moved in some way. The Garden, as Finster’s greatest artwork—and the revelatory locus of his ongoing artistic activities— accomplished the work of any fully effective roadside sign, biblical myth, baptismal dunking, or evangelical revival service. It called for an emotional response. Entering into Finster’s outlandish garden world was as much an aesthetic revelation as it was a specific evangelical or narrowly Christian experience—although depending on the person, it surely could be that as well. This artistically conjured alternative world was a theatrical realm that would, in Finster’s personal vision of these matters, be creatively filled with biblical prophecy, the lushness of God’s original garden on earth, and the inventions of humankind. As Finster memorably said on his “Stranger from Another World” banner (see Figure 14) created in 1977–1978: “I built this park [Paradise Garden] of broken pieces to try to mend a world of people who are traveling their last road.”11 And if he worked hard enough without ever stopping, he would end up with one of everything and enough homiletic signs to cover every contingency. At that impossible moment, the world would be completely remade. And for all of us who dared to enter into that perplexing new world, rebirth beckoned. Playing his banjo, Finster would then holler like a hound! Sing like a bird and smile like a cheetah. The world would be remade. The Second Noah’s ark would have found dry land! Faces in the clouds! A rainbow! The peaceable kingdom revisited.

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In the Garden—as Finster would say while strumming his banjo and singing his signature song of familial redemption, “I’m Just a Little Tack in the Shingle of Your Roof”—one would know that here, right now, no matter the time or season, it was “watermelon time.” It was Finstertime in the Garden, a kind of fleeting time outside the brokenness of ordinary time, a time for all of us, even if we were totally bemused, to sing and smile. Buying a piece of art was the best way to extend and remember the spirit of the Garden and the experience of Finster. Finster knew that it was important, for this reason, always to have a broad range of art, small and large, priced to sell to anyone. The message needed to travel. That was just plain good storytelling, effective religion, and smart merchandising.

lesson of the serpent Like the biblical garden, Finster’s mythic land was both the place of the original goodness of creation and the location of the Fall into the broken human condition. It was forever more a garden of good and evil. Finster’s mythology of the Garden consequently involved the constant presence and activity of those sinuous creatures cursed by God back in the original garden of Paradise. The lowliest of the low, these were the snakes of the earth: “Thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life” (Genesis 3:14). As Finster has said, when he first felt the urge to create the Garden back in the early part of the 1960s (when he was working in the muck of the early Pine Springs Museum and tasting the dust of life), the place he was proposing to tame was mostly a spring-fed, mucky wasteland of weeds used as a neighborhood garbage dump. Most prominent in the streams and muck was the infestation of all kinds of snakes. And he has said that when he started working he was forced to kill hundreds of them, including poisonous cottonmouth water moccasins and copperheads. However, there was always a sense that, despite their cursed status, snakes were also living signs of God’s plan for this planet. Therefore, Finster has stated, when he was bitten (quite rarely), he simply sucked out the poison; and then this incredibly busy man went about his work, creating the Garden.12 The presence of snakes both in the original Edenic garden and in his Garden was memorialized by one of the environment’s distinctive concrete sculptures. This was the famous snake mound (called Serpents of the Wilderness) depicting all kinds of writhing cement

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figure 19. Detail from Howard Finster, Serpents of the Wilderness, the Paradise Garden serpent mound, c. mid to late 1980s. Embedded concrete, approx. 2.5 x 3.5 feet. Girardot/LaBelle Collection. © Photograph by Norman Girardot.

snakes (figure 19). It was purposely designed to be a precaution, to mark the presence of serpents; and at the same time—because of its many small portals—it was meant to be a shelter for these special creatures so much a part of God’s message. The truth is, the snakes in Finster’s Garden were cold-blooded human beings as much as they were crawling reptiles. These serpents of the earth symbolically defined a flawed and coiled aspect of human nature that both defied God and was a source of the godlike creativity of men and women. Moreover, the serpent of pride and snaky commercial entrepreneurship was as much a part of Finster as it was of anyone else. It is the dust that we all eat, and it is our shared heritage; and for an artist, that dust is the very matter and material of art. Human creativity and artistic inventiveness in general depend on those same snaky instincts and on our eating from the Tree of Good and Evil. This is the lesson of the serpent.13 A touching memory of these frequently compromised artistic and commercial concerns is seen in Jonathan Williams’s description of the first time he visited the Garden with Tom Patterson. He says, “I can’t

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forget that when [we] were first escorted in the display room to look for something to buy, Howard picked up a piece of melted TV-glass that he had transformed into Noah’s Ark, and he announced fervently: ‘Now, boys, that’s a piece of what your art expert fellers call your genuine folk art.’ ” Williams dryly comments that the price had been jacked up from forty dollars to seventy-five, which at the time wasn’t such a “big deal.” But it “meant that art-snakes were already slithering around, even back there in the days of Jimmy Carter. Nowadays, one hears of aesthetic jungles in which Finsters fetch over $30,000 [in 2013 almost $54,000].” Wryly reflecting on these developments, Williams notes that it’s “folk art” no doubt, and that Finster “made nearly 40,000 pieces of art.” And all of it must certainly be authentic and “genuine.” But genuine or not, “some’s bettern others. Even when it comes to Vermeer.”14 Ah so, a mythic truth clears the air like a breeze from God falling down on his divine knees. Nevertheless, it was Finster’s visionary and artistic ability to help others see more fully into the depths of their souls, which allowed them to see the snakes—both beneficial and poisonous—that crawl in and out of their lives. Entering another planet, such as the Garden, could in this sense make all the difference in the world. After all, it was an alternative world where one could see more clearly the beauty in junk and the ambiguous goodness in the snakes that hide deep down in the holes of life. Nevertheless, the tragic inevitability of these revelations was that finally we all suffer and die—people, snakes, Jesus, and Finster too. The manner in which the invisible spirit of Finster will continue to speak to later generations depends on various factors—the artistic livelihood of his vision, its ongoing remembrance, mythic resonance, and the continuing physical reality and active life of Paradise Garden. There are still snakes in the Garden eating dust. These are the eternal snakes let loose that bring with them the terrible degradation, the constant skin shedding, of time. For Finster at the end of his life, that involved the tribulations of failing health and family infighting that mocked the possibility of any pretentiously pious and perfect world. Howard Finster, more than most, knew the impossibility of perfection. This was a lesson etched into his spirit and flesh during the course of his career as a small-town, entrepreneurial jack-of-all-trades. And this is the lesson of the serpent that still stalks the Garden in the aftermath of Finster’s departure. The real genius of Southern Evangelical Protestantism in the Finster mode, then, is surely its passionate rejection of religious

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perfection. More important than some kind of simple and final salvation is the hurt recognition that the born again are most often backsliders.

when vision dies Something else is running through my brain these days. Part of it has to do with Finster going off to other worlds. But the real impetus is probably the damnable image of the hidey-holes for snakes that penetrate the flesh and bone of all human lives as we walk through this broken world. It all began while I was working on this book and felt the urge to listen to the raunchy gravel-throated singer-bard and sideshow barker Tom Waits. After bingeing on a half dozen or so of his albums, I came across his unnerving Jesus lament “Way Down in the Hole.” I heard this rough dirge right as I was preparing to write my chapter on the Garden and Finster’s last days on earth. The song insists that, because of all the devils and snakes down in the hole, you’ve got to watch your back. Most of all, grab hold of Jesus’s outstretched hand. Keeping the devil and snakes contained way down in their holes in the garden of life is never easy. It’s especially difficult when the thunder rolls. And it is certainly true that you need to watch your back and lace up your boots. Water moccasins go for the ankles, and sucking poison is never pretty. Most of all, it requires a little help from your friends, like Jesus and, in this case, Tom Waits and Howard Finster too. As Finster’s messianic inclinations became stronger, there were even intimations that at the turn of the twenty-first century it really was Finster who more properly would take Jesus’s hand, point out the path, and lead him through the Garden. A vivid portrayal of Finster watching Jesus’s back and pointing out the sights and signs in the Garden is a gloriously whimsical painting done by the California artist Kata Billups (plate 7), someone who happens to be famous for her portrayals of Elvis’s eternal presence.15 Her painting depicts Finster preaching and performing nonstop for Jesus as they walk through the Garden. It seems that Jesus himself, however, has given up trying to get a word in edgewise and finally appears dumbstruck, and perhaps a bit wearied, by what he is hearing and seeing. The reality of Paradise Garden is that the well-known stranger Howard Finster is gone now. There’s no one to hold our hand or point the way as he did even for Jesus. As Monty Python might say, “He’s passed on. He has ceased to be! Expired and gone to meet his maker! Bereft of life, he rests in peace in some other world!”16 Given his busy-

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ness, it’s tough to believe that he’s really resting. But he’s been dead and buried, and buried yet again, for more than a decade. He would say that he’s done gone home to that original Paradise Garden in the sky. And for all his superhuman energy while on this planet, he would probably admit now to being all worn out, even crucified, on our behalf. No more art, no more signs to make. Even though Finster claimed that he could regenerate his skin like a snake or a lizard, he really could not overcome the deadly deterioration of his own body, any more than he could the clamoring of collectors or fractious family feuding.17 Neither could he prevent during his last years the progressive decline of his Paradise Garden. Even before Finster’s final heavenly passage, his Garden of glittering junk, winking angels, Elvis sightings, flying saucers, rusting tools, moldy gourds, and Coca-Cola bottles lodged within the swampy pine brambles of north Georgia was showing the advanced putrefaction of death. Chunks of inlaid walkways, various important concrete sculptures, the windows to the now teetering World’s Folk Art Church, the twelve-foot Coke bottle, and other important garden artifacts had been sold and carted off for safekeeping by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and by various private collectors. Acknowledging the forces of entropy, decay, and death should not, however, prevent us from realizing that religion and art are the two most significant countervailing powers of regeneration and renewal in human life. Thus both the ethereal realm of tiered mansions in the sky and Finster’s more earthy paradise require constant remembrance, artistic reconstruction, and ritual celebration if they are to continue to live. One of Finster’s favorite biblical texts was the prophetic passage from the Hebrew Book of Proverbs that reminds us: “Where there is no vision, the people perish”(Proverbs 29:18). Finster and other self-taught artists and environment makers would say that if there is no way to enter into, make real, or remember worlds of visionary experience, then we perish. Then joy and wonder die. Even God, it seems, needs the snake and the devil, needs multiple human visionaries who, like Jesus and Finster and Elvis, are truly aliens from other worlds. Why? So that we sinners might be saved and saved again, so that we might feel the writhing movement of the serpentine spirit still in our hearts, so that we might be fully human and joyfully alive. So that we might wonder again about the obdurate strangeness of the human enterprise. We need a fallen world in order to be human. We are all snake handlers in God’s garden of life. We need the reptilian poison—the visionary ecstasy, amazing grace, and aesthetic experience—that is finally the medicine of life. A snake, a garden environment, biblical words, and

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painted images in visionary tradition are in this way signs of the hidden existence of spirit in human life. Like crop circles, these signs are mysteries, made up, conjured, or perhaps messages to be interpreted, but nevertheless they point to something extraordinarily human if not extraterrestrial. The sinuous secret of this kind of spiritual or symbolic recognition may be the deep human confluence of visionary and artistic, religious and aesthetic, ecstatic and creative, experience. It is this fallen, broken, or snaky condition of the temporal world that accounts for the existential necessity of both religion and art. It is the amazing grace that emerges ritually and aesthetically only in time and in the face of individual suffering, moral injustice, and social friction that builds and rebuilds meaning for individuals and communities—that is, the cardinal directions, holiday festivities, traffic lights, morality, ecstasy, and beauty too. This happens best when we periodically encounter and inhabit wondrous worlds constructed in ways that refresh our everyday world. These special worlds within our mundane world open us to the promise and hope of spiritual, aesthetic, and moral regeneration. We need, then, to enter into the visionary worlds of shaman-artists so that we can be renewed and healed sufficiently to take up again, at least temporarily, the burden of the many ordinary and real worlds that define and weigh down our lives. We must continuously explore other marginally or fabulously unreal worlds to be human. We do so because these other worlds, these fantastic realms constructed out of the nostalgically mangled bric-a-brac of religious vision and popular culture, help us carry on within our given, taken for granted, or Jackass: The Movie worlds of meaningless malls, tasteless fast-food restaurants, Internet pornography, and moronic television reality shows. With a little help from artist friends like Finster, we can all be our own TVs or iPads. “Religion and art are not precisely equivalent terms but relational perspectives” on the importance of imaginary world building.18 They are both ways of seeing the world as signs calling for a response. This is, moreover, a kind of seeing, building, or making that comes forth most powerfully from the fringes of the already mapped worlds of experience. That is, it comes from the expressive activities of artists and visionaries who are to some degree outside of—psychologically, sociologically, economically, culturally, or ecstatically “set apart” from—the various official worlds of mainstream culture. They are the ones who—like Wes Anderson, as the filmmaker of cinematic cabinets of curiosity—feel compelled to create realms that transcend and subvert the normal order of things. The condition of being an outsider in some cultural or psycho-

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logical way is, in fact, often conducive to the creation of new worlds of meaning.19

at home in other worlds In addition to the snakes in the garden, there is another coiled truth to acknowledge in the course of human life. This is the simple awareness that for this world to have human meaning and stability, to be temporarily in place as a cosmos, we need a specific and centered firmament within which to live—a hearth, a cave, a tent, a home, a house, a yard, a garden, a neighborhood, a community, a village, a city. It is in this sense that special microcosmic places, these multiple fantastic worlds of the imagination and artistic expression, are not merely alternative worlds. These imaginative places or environments include, for example, various Christian and Buddhist heavens, Finster’s garden, the fabulous constructions and yard art of other mainstream and self-taught artists throughout the South and elsewhere, and all the literary and artistic paradises and utopias of the past.20 These unusual worlds all help us make this world lively and renewable. We go to them to be more fully here again. They are, even when ironically or aesthetically imagined, places where our hopes, dreams, and fears are constantly mirrored as reflections and refractions. They are places created in response to the elemental nostalgia or need for being “in place” and “at home” in a dark and dangerous world, and they give our everyday worlds a connection with a larger cosmos of imaginative possibility, quirky passion, and spiritual meaning. For those of us who live in worlds largely defined by the Google grid (and gods) of precisely pixilated reality, neatly trimmed lawns, white walls of galleries and museums, and gated retirement communities, there is a profound, if often repressed, need to encounter other more eccentric and messy worlds. This “lust” for alternative Arcadian realms runs throughout human tradition.21 There is, then, a special incantatory power in the unbound, recycled, and embedded concrete constructions of Finster and the recently deceased Mr. Imagination, the wildly welded and twisted steel critters of an outsider artist like Charlie Lucas in Alabama, or the creatively carved industrial sandstone and shamanistic chanting of Lonnie Holley, now in Atlanta—all set within the organic freedom of a garden, field, forest, yard, or urban environment.22 They remind us of something all too easily forgotten in our comfortable “real” worlds. The simple truth is that, finally, all human worlds are made from the dreamy utopian miasma of the visionary imagination.

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All our worlds, even the most mundane, were once quite fantastic and unreal—at that moment of creation when the bloody umbilical cord of the imagination was still uncut. There is always the potential for terror, and a real bloodiness, in relation to these unreal worlds—particularly when they are imagined too absolutely, literally, intolerantly, and religiously. As the terribly tragic events of 9/11 have shown us, paradisiacal images—for instance, that Islamic heavenly oasis with seventy-two veiled virgins erotically panting after Allah’s triumphant martyrs—may become the motivating emotion behind the most despicable of destructive acts perpetrated against the contemporary “global” world of Americanized economic, technological, and military power. The apocalyptic religious fixation on such paradisiacal worlds by those who have suffered and who are, in some manner, outside the cultural mainstream of the modern secular world as defined by elite Western tradition is almost always a two-edged sword. The potential is there for the renewal and salvation of spirit, but at the same time there is a pent-up tension, sexual frustration, and anger that can just as well give rise to delusion, irrationality, and extreme violence. Tolerance and terror, freedom and confinement, creativity and chaos, ecstasy and madness, humor and seriousness, religious passion and sexual lust, joy and pain, are always to some degree conjoined in the imagination. Certainly they are qualities often confusingly associated with the idealized or concretized images of paradisiacal and religious environments. The tension and ambivalence of these imaginative worlds is, for example, seen in the suicide of the outsider artist/fortune teller Eddie Owens Martin (a.k.a. Saint EOM) in his self-created world of Pasaquan, or in the actual apocalypses perpetrated on themselves and others by the members of Jim Jones’s People’s Temple and Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate. Art, like religion, is surely the “work that is play”—as the joyful and obsessive productions of so many self-taught world-makers show us. But such imaginative activity is also subject to the imperious distortions of a frighteningly deadly game devoted to the annihilation of all infidels.23 The Evangelical Protestant vision so often connected with self-taught religious environments in the South is typically literal in its apocalyptic theology and religiously intolerant of those outside the “one true” faith. W. C. Rice’s Miracle Cross Garden in Alabama is one colorful example of the uncompromising hell-and-brimstone genre—although for all of Rice’s righteous bluster and stark imagery, he was surprisingly solicitous of curious infidel admirers. And this is, perhaps, another instance

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of a certain artistic amelioration of the absolutist religious imagination. More dramatically, Howard Finster has shown us how the visionary expansion and artistic expression of evangelical themes can actually transform and enlarge the horizons of some forms of Protestant Evangelicalism. The words Finster spoke in his role as God’s Last Red Light remained superficially narrow to the end of his days, but his artistic interpretation of those words became increasingly inclusive and compassionate. His personal behavior as the puckish Man of Visions was open to all and embraced not only Christians but also all kinds of religious, racial, sexual, and cultural outcasts. In fact, he sometimes seemed closer to his “sinner friends” and “Buddha friends” than he was to a lot of conventional Christians. On one of his thought cards (written in the late 1970s or early 1980s), he affirms that he “has the same story for all.” It was especially his work as a visionary artist (even though “he don’t claim to be an artist yet so many say that he is”) that he came to recognize as “an answer to his job on earth planet as a summons or requirement of God from heaven.”24

millennial sadness One of the most haunting aspects of self-taught environmental art is, as Roger Cardinal reminds us, “its tendency to embody precariousness.”25 This is not so much an evil but the hard organic truth of the snakelike and skin-shedding spirit of recycling that always exists within the multiple gardens that define human life. Unlike human beings, environments can be resurrected. Healing comes from the recognition that all existing gardens, worlds, persons, and communities need periodically to be refreshed and rebuilt. Then, through the special efforts of those who have the eyes to see and the art to make their visions real, unexpected and seemingly fantastic worlds will be produced for public exploration and habitation. Otherwise, as the Bible and Finster remind us, “the people perish.” In the decade after the messianic extraterrestrial from north Georgia departed for other worlds, there was sadness in the hearts of those who remembered the Garden in its days of spirit-filled glory. And until a couple of years ago, many would have said—and I was among that group— that it was best to let the Garden and the World’s Folk Art Church return from whence they came: that original watery, chaotic marsh of people, dirt, snakes, and trash on several acres of land in northwest Georgia.

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“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” “Tohu wabohu” (Genesis 1). For me there was a special sorrow in this that went back to my turn-of-the-century involvement at one of Finster’s last public appearances before his death. This event took place away from Finster’s home ground and the Garden. Indeed, it was in New York City, that Babylon of unbelievers, at an exhibition in the American Museum of Folk Art curated by the then director Gerard Wertkin and titled Millennial Dreams, Vision and Prophecy in American Folk Art. The exhibition, which opened late in 1999 and ran through the millennial shift, was replete with many different folk and outsiderish millennial dreams and visions, and it included a number of Finster’s early apocalyptic artworks. As part of the exhibition, there was a special symposium on the vagaries of millennial speculation and art, which was focused on everyone’s favorite folksy prophet of doom, Howard Finster. I was invited to be a part of this panel (which, in addition to Wertkin and myself, included Richard Landes, a distinguished scholar of millennialism). Even better was that I was asked to put together a slide show of Finster’s especially provocative apocalyptic works, about which, as the high point of the event, he would be asked for his comments. What we did not know was that Finster had been ill with a combination of diabetic complications and a touch of walking pneumonia. He was really not up to the rigors of a plane flight and a situation where he would be expected to perform in his usual flamboyant preacher’s mode—with perhaps a little banjo picking and shape-note singing. Never someone to pass up an opportunity to sell himself to the city slickers, and in response to the prompting and with the assistance of his daughter Beverly, he went ahead and accepted the invitation. The evening of the symposium saw a crowd of outsider-art enthusiasts and Finster fans who had come to see the celebrated preacher-artist from Georgia. Stooped and clutching onto Beverly, Finster arrived wearing his favorite electric blue suit and a wan smile. Unfortunately, it rapidly became apparent that he was no longer his ebullient and feisty self. He had lost a considerable amount of weight and, with a drawn face and weak gestures, he looked both sick and desperately exhausted. But the show must go on, and we three symposium members dutifully gave our short presentations on the history and meaning of millennial traditions in the West, my own talk emphasizing what I saw as the distinct mellowing of Finster’s early apocalyptic damnations. The proceedings then came to that point designed to feature Finster’s comments on

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the slide show of his end-time artworks. The problem was that, after he made a few halfhearted and not entirely audible attempts at responding, we all realized that he simply was not in any condition to discuss, and in some cases even to remember, his own work that evening. Stepping into the lurch, Gerry Wertkin sympathetically and gracefully commented on some of the slides and then quickly asked the audience if there were any final questions. What I remember is that, in an inimitable New York manner deeply contemptuous of Finster’s evangelical beliefs, someone combatively asked how he could condemn all so-called infidels to hell. I don’t really recall what Finster said, but I do have a sense that it was uncharacteristically more of a feeble sputter than any kind of real answer. Moreover it was obvious that Finster looked completely depleted in body and spirit. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was time to conclude the event that forlorn evening. Later that night at a restaurant involving the symposium participants, I had a chance to talk with Finster and inquire about his health. The response was disheartening, in that he admitted to having various ailments and that despite the efforts of Beverly, the Garden was rapidly deteriorating. He even confessed to a foreboding sense of what would happen to the Garden after he died. Most disturbing, and something that still weighs upon me to this day, is that a year and some months later, after he died, Beverly confided to me that her daddy never really recovered from that New York trip. Having played a role in getting him to come to that ill-fated symposium, I cannot help but have continuing pangs of regret. Moreover, toward the end of the first decade of the new millennium, my lingering sadness was compounded by the realization that what Finster had ominously felt would take place in the Garden after his death had largely come to pass.26

chapter 7

The Strange Beauty of Bad and Nasty Art Toward a Finsterian Aesthetic

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. —William Blake

Art is anything you can get away with. —Andy Warhol

My work is scrubby. It’s bad, nasty art. But it’s telling something. You don’t have to be a perfect artist to work in art. —Howard Finster

[The] proportion of masterpieces and genius, and the incidence of quality among outsiders, is about what we would find within the art world. The causes, explanations and meanings, of course, differ from what the art world understands and teaches. —Arthur Danto

any child can do it One summer day in 1986, after finishing the Lehigh Memorial Sculpture in Paradise Garden (as described in the introduction), I was in a blissful mood. I had done something unusual for an academic, and I felt better about myself and my serendipitous and wholly improbable involvement

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with the emergent field of self-taught, or outsider, art. I had also by this time in my academic career published my first book and had, after a wayward experience at Notre Dame University and a brief sojourn at Oberlin College, received tenure at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I was almost prouder of my makeshift concrete sculpture in Finster’s bizarre environment of biblical signage and redeemed junk than my academic work. At least that’s the way I felt at that particular time and place. On that warm day in Georgia, all was right in the world; and having just spent more than a week and a half sleeping on a dilapidated couch in Finster’s old cockroach-infested studio in the Garden, I was feeling elated and energized. Especially important to me was the old Man of Visions’ approval of the Lehigh sculpture in the Garden. More than anything he said, it was his wry smile as he carefully examined the structure (looking for snake holes no doubt) that made all the difference in the world. In some half-conscious way I had “done good,” or at the very least I had done something that pleased the master of the Garden. The time had come to return to my family, who were impatiently waiting for me at my parents’ home back in Atlanta. I quickly gathered up my clothes, toiletry bag, and tools. And with numerous farewells to Finster’s grandchildren and friends who had helped me throughout my stay, I headed out to the interstate to Atlanta. It was a gloriously sunny day; and as UB40’s version of Neil Diamond’s “Red Red Wine” played loudly on the car radio, I focused on my promise to get back in time for a party my parents were having for family and some friends at their house. When I arrived in the late afternoon at my parents’ place in northeast Atlanta, close to the Emory University campus, the party had already started. As I got out of the car, I realized that I was still dressed in my sweat-stained cutoff blue jeans and a faded black T-shirt. Somewhat sheepishly, I attempted to sneak off to change clothes. But I was quickly intercepted by my always cheerful and vigilant mother, who steered me into the thick of the party. She then announced to the gaping partygoers that her prodigal professor-son had finally returned home. She seemed relieved since, as she said, I had spent more than a week at the home of that crazy Baptist preacher-artist Howard Finster up in the boondocks in Summerville. By this time there had been enough local publicity about the outlandish goings-on in north Georgia that most everyone at the party knew exactly who my mother was referring to and why he might be called crazy. I don’t really remember if my mother actually said “crazy,” but whatever the more polite expression (and my mother was forever

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polite), the effect was clearly the same among the assembled, smiling, but mostly bemused, older, urban middle-class friends of my parents. My own wife and kids already knew the terrible truth about my adventures with Finster, and my brothers and their families, too, had come to grips with my seemingly frivolous activities. For the others in attendance that day, it was another matter—mostly well-mannered disbelief but also considerable indignation. Circling around me (and someone had by now given me a glass of Chardonnay), a number of people started to pepper me with questions about what I had done and why. And what about Howard Finster? Who was he? Really! Wasn’t he a backwoods preacher with only an elementary-school education? How could anyone take him seriously? Especially someone who was a university professor! And why, indeed, had I gone up there for such a long time? Really! What was going on? The velocity and aggressive nature of these queries put me in a pugnacious mood, and I recall at first responding with some cryptically fatuous remarks about Finster being one of the three most impressive human beings I had ever met in my life. I proceeded grandiloquently to list my mentor , the famed Romanian American comparative religionist at the University of Chicago, Mircea Eliade; and the brilliant British polymath and pioneering expert on the history of Chinese science, at Cambridge University, Joseph Needham, whom I had just met while I was on a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in England. Lastly and as a completely incongruous finale and flourish, I included the Baptist preacher and outsider artist Howard Finster, who had only a sixth-grade education. Admittedly I was attempting to be provocative, although in my own mind and experience there was some underlying, if hidden, truth to what I was saying. Not surprisingly, this pronouncement caused more consternation than understanding. However, much of the confusion had to do with the fact that the only one of the three that anyone of this decidedly nonacademic group had heard about was Howard Finster. Fully agitated now, the crowd moved on to more compelling truths. “So,” someone irritably said, “isn’t he the rabid Baptist preacher who claims that God told him to paint fire-and-brimstone warnings of the end-time?” “Doesn’t he condemn all of us here in Atlanta—whether Catholics, Jews, agnostics, random atheists, or infidels?” “And isn’t the kind of so-called art we’re all talking about incredibly simplistic and crude, mostly cartoonlike, works that can hardly be considered ‘real art’?” “Not like the art at the Metropolitan, at MoMA, or even at the

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Guggenheim? Certainly not like art at the High in downtown Atlanta!” “It’s not even very good folk art, not like Grandma Moses or even like our local favorite, Clementine Hunter! It’s not fine art, not real art! Not even real folk art!” A slight lull ensued. Then someone blurted out a question, and others triumphantly repeated it: “Isn’t his work, stuff that any child could do?” I don’t remember to what degree smugness swept through the group at that moment, but I do have a dim memory that, tired and sweaty, I felt I could only give up. And I did. I mumbled unfunny platitudes about the monkey who painted works that couldn’t be distinguished from Cy Twombly’s work. Whether bird droppings were really any different than Jackson Pollack’s drippings. And so on. But my heart was no longer in it and I retired from the fray to finally put on some clean and more respectable clothes. The rest of the evening was devoted to other topics. I drank too much wine, and two days later my family and I drove home to Pennsylvania. My mother was smiling to the bitter end.

what about the art? Well, what about the art? As some might say, my infatuation with the religious implications of the Finster phenomenon may have blinded me to the stark reality that the art simply was not very good. It might even have been that as a religion scholar out of his element in the tar pits of art history, I had been, to paraphrase the pungent words of the musician Thomas Dolby, “blinded by [my academic] science.” But to put aside as much as possible any Enlightenment antireligious bias and a modernist preference for abstraction over representation, the truth regarding Finster seemed to be that, as evidenced by clumsy crayon doodles on many Chuck E. Cheese placemats, any child really could do it. End of the discussion. Or more precisely, it is aesthetic quality that counts. And with Finster’s work, according to many knowledgeable commentators, we’re not even in the same league as the work of some other classic outsiders, whose aesthetic and monetary value has skyrocketed. I’m thinking here of those who could be called the prominent “outsider modernists”—darlings of New York insiders whose standards run from Jean Dubuffet to Marcel Duchamp to Clement Greenberg and Arthur Danto. This is a pantheon that includes, among others (often of the vintage art-brut variety), Adolf Wölfli, Bill Traylor, Martín Ramírez, Henry Darger, Johann Hauser, William Edmondson, Joseph Yoakum, Aloïse Corbaz, James Castle, and Thornton Dial. Moreover, in the case

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of the Americans, it did not hurt to be ethnically marginal, reclusive, or hospitalized. Finster tends only to hover around these figures, often known more for his quirky religion and Southern gothic celebrity than for any perceived artistic quality. Signs and sermons in paint. Messages from God. Revelations from beyond the sun. As Howard Finster said, his work wasn’t meant to be pretty. His work wasn’t art for the sake of art or beauty. No, his art was primarily trying to tell us something that we really didn’t want to hear: Damnation! Coming soon! Get right with the Lord! No cold Cokes in hell. No restrooms either. A kind of visual preaching. Signs of the times. Signs and more signs. It was nasty art both in terms of its apocalyptic theology and its unconcern for conventional aesthetic appearance. But as legend has it, the first image Finster painted was not religiously sacred at all; rather, it was a picture of George Washington copied from a dollar bill. It seems, however, that the finger face (God or whoever was speaking to him) and Finster never equated commerce and idolatry. There were no graven images as long as they were used to further God’s work. Finster’s art as sacred signs required a sacred merchandising to help spread the message. What God wanted was an art of many words and images to get the job done. Quantity, for both God and Finster, mostly seemed to trump aesthetic quality, especially toward the end of his life. The deity of the Bible simply does not seem to care very much for the aesthetic dimension of human art—only that art was doing its duty as signage putting out the good news about how bad things really are. That’s why, it seems, God needed someone like Finster, a space invader from another world, to get human art back on its extraterrestrial track. Finster emphatically took God’s mandate to heart—but he always reserved the right to tinker with the medium and the message. To get out the message, he used anything at hand or thrown away, things hurriedly transformed into an art that he was unashamed to call bad and nasty. This was an art produced on almost every imaginable castoff material, and the artist used multiple self-taught, experimental, and constantly evolving techniques. Tractor enamel rubbed on discarded plywood, gourds, roots, potted-meat tins, embedded concrete, mirrors, pieces of acrylic, wipe rags, toilet seats, Coca-Cola bottles, TV tubes, tennis shoes, and so on. As Finster once said about his capacious, capricious, and “computerized” brain, “I don’t even consider bein’ an artist, I don’t consider bein’ an artist at all. My art is visions from God. Like a fellow at this big university wanted to know how’d I do all this. I said, ‘Do you have a computer?’ He said,

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‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Well, God computerizes my brain and it comes right down my hands and comes right out as God computerizes it.’ I do my art direct from God.”1

questions of aesthetic quality Putting aside the “direct from God” meaning of the religious messages, biblical stories, evangelical admonishments, and visionary revelations— and even if Finster himself did not seem to consider “bein’ an artist at all”—the question addressed here concerns the artistic significance and aesthetic quality of Finster’s prolific and bewildering production. While acknowledging his truly amazing—even frenzied and ecstatic—energy and productivity, I want to contemplate the difficult question, or more accurately the multiple and overlapping questions, of aesthetic quality amid all this overwhelming quantity. Where’s the art in the untidy chaos, and how does one judge it in a meaningful way? Especially since so much of it seems to inhabit a tumultuous realm largely outside the pure white walls of the official art world. Is it possible to articulate an outsider aesthetic appropriate to the daunting task of evaluating what is bad, good, mediocre, great, or just plain indifferent among Finster’s myriad artworks? How to account for the undeniable pleasure given by Finster’s best work? And is this pleasure aesthetic in any conventional sense? What is aesthetic pleasure anyway—conventional or otherwise? Taste? The selective stimulation of certain clustered nerve endings in the brain? Sublimated class bias? An evolutionary adaptation or “natural proclivity”? Something about the gut, the eye, or some mysterious romantic feelings? And when is a painting like a finely wrought pizza?2 Isn’t all this art-talk about quality and value inherently culture bound and hopelessly controlled or mediated by a whole imbricated set of Westerncolonialist, imperialistic, and racial prejudices? Or, more cynically and simply, is it a matter of the power, money, and market of the elitist art world? Museum blather? Canonical exclusivity? Sexist bias? Hasn’t postmodernist theory—so beloved by academics and art critics but so generally dreaded for its excesses of impenetrable theoretical jargon and reductionistic conclusions—definitively undercut all formal standards of aesthetic judgment, all universals of artistic purity and evaluation?3 Evaluative art criticism has been on the wane for several decades, but the New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl still speaks poetically and poignantly about the aesthetics of both mainstream and outsider art.4 Schjeldahl

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points out that, when he first encountered the “eruptive singularity” of Finster’s work in the early 1980s, the painted barrage of what seemed like his literalistic and completely narrow theology could only lead to an intellectual and aesthetic prison house. It is not merely bad art, he says, but an art with an ultimately depressing message and mentality. Our reaction to these curious and compulsive “sermons in paint” may begin in delight and amazement, but for Schjeldahl this early enjoyment inevitably ends in disappointment and despair. The surprise and joy is finally overwhelmed by Finster’s “terrible hectic garrulousness” and lack of “consciousness” regarding reality. Thus Schjeldahl pungently observes, “To the extent that I take him seriously, I feel sick to my stomach.”5 For many sensitive and knowledgeable commentators like Schjeldahl and Roger Cardinal, Finster’s work was both appealing and appalling at the same time.6 Is it possible to talk meaningfully about the surprising beauty to be found in the countless scrawled and painted messages from God’s Last Red Light? In some art-critical circles it is, in fact, the bad, crude, ugly, frightening, and subversive work of mainstream and outsider artists that is especially treasured—precisely since the terrible beauty of this work contrasts so blatantly with middle-class standards of sentimentalized beauty. Henry Darger’s disemboweled little girls with penises are a prime example of this from the outsider realm. In their ever-desperate need to be on the cutting edge of every possible artistic trend, numerous mainstream artists have in recent years ended up emulating the Dargeresque content and style.7 At the same time, there are some outsider artists who have been canonically sanctioned as classical or masterful exactly because their work resonates so well with certain elite standards of formalist aesthetic significance, which oddly emulates aspects of Dubuffet’s self-styled anticultural bias. It is not so surprising, therefore, that even before the fullblown emergence of the outsider field in the 1980s, William Edmundson (a primitive African American Brancusi?) and Bill Traylor (a self-taught African American Klee or Miro?) would be anointed by the high priest of MoMA modernism, Alfred Barr.8 Nor can it be denied that a romantically tweaked version of modernist expressionism is sometimes applied to the “masters” of outsider art. Representing a later era, one that reflects more of the artistic sensibility of Warhol, Haring, and Basquiat, Finster’s works are sometimes judged to be folksy variations on a pop-cartoon aesthetic of commercial marketability. Often this seems like a standard of interpretive assessment primarily designed to rescue the work from its own naive religious convictions.9 But what-

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ever he was, Finster was certainly not naive. He was always too much the shrewd sideshow barker/preacher/showman/salesman for that. Instead of some loosely expanded standards of beauty, sublimity, modernity, high-low pop funkiness, or so-bad-it’s-good campiness, perhaps the possibility of a more hybrid aesthetic category or mash-up sensibility should be entertained for Finster. What this would be like is not entirely clear, but to borrow Roger Cardinal’s words, an outsider aesthetic might involve an “autistic air” compounded with feelings of “participatory bemusement,” strangeness, amazement, and wonderment arising from the related yet distinctive obsessive, psychotic/bipolar, ecstatic, and/or visionary qualities of outsider art.10 But how would I or anyone else meaningfully describe such qualities? Perhaps this whole discussion is just another way of talking about the old Dadaist feeling for the surreal? And in what way would the autistic/compulsive and visionary otherness of such a category relate to more conventional formalist criteria of color, form, and composition? Isn’t there a need to avoid any simple equation of ecstatic or visionary experience with psychotic states? In like manner, shouldn’t I avoid making too many assumptions about the seamless and evolutionary nature of visionary and/or mystical experience and its relationship to aesthetic creativity and expression? Are there truly some smooth, phenomenological similarities linking shamanism, ritualized trance induction, mediumistic possession, mystical ecstasy, visionary states of consciousness, and artistic creativity? What does it mean when, in the case of Finster’s revelatory experience in 1976, something in a smear of paint talks back to him? What is the common ground for the “varieties of religious experience” (using William James’s classic expression), mental illness, and artistic creativity?

masterworks in time and space It may well be that pompous and premature talk about masterpieces gives a bad name to the whole suspicious enterprise of aesthetic judgment. As the celebrated art historian Kenneth Clark was wont to say in his inimitably patrician way, masterworks must treat “serious themes” that “touch us at many levels,” but there must also be the stamp of a “genius” who is so “absorbed” in the “spirit of the time” that he is able to make “his individual experiences universal.”11 The scholar Jakob Rosenberg, in his Mellon lectures on the “criteria of artistic excellence,” declared that “artistic value” or quality “is not a matter of personal opinion but the

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“common agreement” among connoisseurs—that special cadre of “artistically sensitive and trained observers.” It is the “formal organization” of the artwork—whether a representational or abstract work—that is the connoisseur’s “index of quality.”12 And as Ernst Gombrich, the doyen of twentieth-century art historians, noted about Rosenberg’s discussion, the various criteria associated with “formal organization” can probably best be subsumed under the principle of “control”: “the great artist . . . is in superb control of his medium.”13 The validity of these assertions is supposedly proven by the venerable “test of time.” In other words, is it not finally the case that the value and quality of all artworks will be cumulatively ratified by the consensus of connoisseurs and academic experts through the ages, no matter the vagaries of contemporary judgments? The problem with these traditional theories is suggested by the most precious and seemingly timeless of world masterpieces, the Mona Lisa. Of course, the very fact that this work is ranked as the greatest of world masterpieces is mostly an artifact of an overwhelming Western bias. Thus the extreme aesthetic significance and value of this brilliantly enigmatic work painted by Leonardo da Vinci, the reputed greatest universal genius of all time, is largely a creation of museum culture in nineteenthcentury France during the heyday of the global European imperialistic hegemony.14 This is not to say that the Mona Lisa is not an impressive, beguiling, and masterful work. But to claim that it is the supreme masterwork of all world art is wholly another and more problematic issue. It is not at all clear what formal aesthetic criteria make the Mona Lisa more of a masterwork than many other technically skilled and really good figurative artworks from the Renaissance or later. And when compared with the more austere and nonperspectival Asian art, the whole issue becomes impossibly moot. Is the greatness of the Mona Lisa truly a matter of transcendent artistic beauty, the control of the artist, and an incomparable formal organization? And what about those other factors involving the single-vanishingpoint perspective, the illusory perfection of the hands, the tonal quality of the paint layered by means of the sfumato technique, and, more romantically, that sly and knowing smile? Perhaps even more important is the role this work plays in the ascension of the Louvre, in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the greatest imperialistic repository of artistic genius in the entire world. However, because of the astonishing popular success of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, perhaps it is obvious (with a wink and a nudge) that the Mona Lisa’s value has little to do with absolute

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aesthetic qualities. As with Leonardo’s Last Supper, it’s all a code concealing hermetic secrets. It’s a matter of revealing a hidden quasi-apocalyptic message about the secret life of Jesus and his grail, vessel, or wife. Incredibly, and playfully, enough, the work that is reputedly the greatest artistic masterpiece of all time turns out to be a Finsteresque sign of hidden religious secrets about the end-time. It’s not art, or its aesthetic qualities, that makes it important but, as Finster would say, the revelatory fact that it’s really trying to tell us something about which we are blind. The remarkable saga of the Mona Lisa suggests that the very meaning and designation of a “masterpiece” or “masterwork”—as well as the concept of the artistic “master” or “genius”—are always subject to the perspectival dynamics of cultural history. The problem is that often the activity of naming masterworks is more “symptomatic than illuminating”—that is, more symptomatic of a particular relativistic cultural condition or era than revealing of any absolute or essential aesthetic qualities. As a shifty term, masterwork has undergone a series of transformations throughout Western tradition. Introduced in the Middle Ages as a term for a “test piece” required for gaining the rank of master in a craftsman’s guild, the term in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to refer classically and romantically to a uniquely brilliant and definitive work by a “genius.”15 These geniuses were, overwhelmingly, white men whose unique wisdom and skill epitomized the Renaissance pictorial tradition while at the same time summing up the best of the male prerogatives of elite culture. In the romantic notion of the genius—the inner spirit guiding the outer manifestations of technical skill—there is also reference to the role of the muse, and the extraterrestrial powers of the imagination, as the source of artistic creativity. In Finster’s life and in the visionary foundations of his artistic work, there is a clear continuation of these themes via his evangelical and promotional emphasis on Holy Ghost feelings and the divine intervention of angels, even angelic beings like Elvis. As the highest ideal of skill and artistic accomplishment, the idea of the masterwork in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries referred mainly to the tradition of oil painting and meant the ability to paint in a way that produced an illusory representation of the real. The closer these small, flat, painted renditions resembled or imitated the appearance of the outer world, the more it was possible to say that a masterful re-creation had taken place. At the same time, the determination of canonical lists of “greats” in different fields—masters and masterworks in the sense of fine or high art—was established within the newly founded academies, salons,

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and museums as a way to ensure a consistent tradition of educational models for imitation and evaluation. With the coming of the modernist tradition in the West at the start of the twentieth century, and the emergence of the artistic avant-garde, there was a profound effort to challenge many of the academic and canonical assumptions of the earlier period, an effort that included especially the move away from mimetic figuration and perspectival depth in painting. Despite these changes during the first half of the century, the romantic ideal of the lone intuitive genius became even more pronounced and protean. The operative image was that of the artist-hero who was spontaneously driven to create and express the pure abstract forms, geometric structures, and energetic forces of the inner psyche and outer cosmos. These developments were a realization of Honoré de Balzac’s prophetic tale “The Unknown Masterpiece” (Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu; 1831), which ends with a painted masterpiece by the tormented genius Frenhofer.16 As a shocking antithesis of the classical and neoclassical works of the nineteenth century, this peculiar masterpiece was a canvas that displayed only a nasty Finster-like “wipe rag” swirl of color and form with one small enigmatic human foot emerging from a lower section of the painting (plate 8 shows the Balzacian manner of one of Finster’s wipe-rag paintings). It is this diminished figurative appendage struggling to emerge from the abstract ground of chaotic paint that haunts the rest of the twentieth century as the emphasis on figuration and abstraction, beautiful object and expressive process, waxed and waned. By the last half of the twentieth century, which saw the emergence of all kinds of nonrepresentational, found-object, performance, pop, minimalist, and conceptual art, in addition to earth art and video art, the criteria for naming a masterwork of any kind became increasingly uncertain and controversial. Connoisseurship as a privileged method of the visual appraisal of objects was on the defensive as art historians increasingly shunned qualitative judgment in favor of description and sociocultural analysis. In the aftermath of these developments, there is a lingering reluctance to take up the challenge of naming masterpieces at all. Quality is still put forward as the essential factor in judging aesthetic and monetary value, but the meaning and method of that attribute is almost impossibly fickle. The field of self-taught, or outsider, art—as a counterpoint to, and a marginal part of, mainstream art history— becomes an especially interesting forum for raising many of these issues of evaluation and judgment.

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How, then, do I analyze the aesthetic response to Finster’s art— particularly since his work may be taken as a test case for the larger aesthetic issues raised here? Didn’t Finster make multiple cartoonish, though quite peculiar, folk-art versions of a visionary Mona Lisa?17 In what way, then, do such cartoon works either diminish or extend the aura, authenticity, and master status of the original? What are the formal qualities of Finster’s self-styled scrubby art, and to what extent are they the same as or different from Jakob Rosenberg’s “formal organization” and Ernst Gombrich’s idea of masterful “control”? Furthermore, to what extent should we accept at face value Finster’s declaration that only the apocalyptic message counts, not the aesthetics? And is it always quantity over quality for Finster? Quantity may be privileged in the short term, but surely in the final analysis it will be the artistic quality of Finster’s best and most masterful work that will be known and remembered. Quantity may not be the most important issue if there is nothing aesthetically arresting about the work. This is true for effective Rock City, Coca-Cola, or Jesus signage as much as it is for the works of Keith Haring, Mark Kostabi, Andy Warhol, and Howard Finster. Many artworks by Finster—especially many of his mass-produced and often overly repetitious cutouts—are simply not very interesting or arresting. Too many of his self-described hits became a stream of hastily reproduced knockoffs. And yes, there are works that are too biblically didactic or formulaically cute, especially when unleavened by Finster’s saving grace of visionary outlandishness and verbal humor. There are also individually painted works that were too quickly or sloppily done and often disappointing. Like every artist, Finster produced works— whether cutouts or his more singular works—that were simply not very good. Whether done by Finster, Warhol, or Damien Hirst, there are always some really good and some really bad works. As the knowledgeable and sensitive critic Roger Cardinal truthfully said of Finster, he was at times “slack and uninspired.” Many of Finster’s works, especially his later works, are not even intriguing examples of his signature bad and nasty art.

aesthetic and religious considerations Admitting to the reality of qualitative variability, as well as reflecting on Peter Schjeldahl’s indigestion over Finster’s theology and on Finster’s own willingness to compromise quality in the interest of a quick sale, I can still say that Finster was capable of producing impressively memorable and

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unexpectedly attractive works of art. Many of these were his large, four-by-four-foot, one of a kind paintings—as well as some of his early carved-wood sculptures and more inspired cutouts (such as his many eye-catching angel variations, the especially weird imagery of his Cow Woman series, and certain unique graphic works). But frequently his more striking and effective works were created while he was in his Duchampian or Balzacian “Unknown Masterpiece” mode, when he experimented with all sorts of ready-made assemblages, boxed dioramas, and constructions made of Plexiglas or wood or both, as well as chipboard, wipe-rag, dripped-paint, and found-image work, resulting in art that was not always overtly biblical or religious. And as seen in the self-published Howard Finsters Vision of 1982 and other drawings and lithographs (e.g., see figures 1, 13, and 16), he had an exceptional talent for graphic design and composition. These special works—whether of the apocalyptic religious-biblical, historical, visionary, or more open-ended experimental variety—displayed an evolving mastery of self-taught technique, a creative feel for materials, an innovative talent for pictorial or spatial composition, and a graphic inventiveness, all of which underscore his ability as an artist of considerable aesthetic accomplishment. This distinctive convergence of quantity and quality in Finster’s body of work emerged in an especially dramatic way in the period of visionary intensity, technical experimentation, and burgeoning fame running from the 1970s through the end of the 1980s. The qualities of formal organization and artistic control—as well as some of the criteria identified with modernist aesthetics—cannot be easily dismissed from my consideration of a vernacular aesthetic applicable to outsider art. Finster always knew the importance of honing his artistic craftsmanship as he did with his carpentry. As Finster refined his artistic skills at the end the 1970s and then especially throughout most of the 1980s, it is clear that he increasingly wanted to be judged by the aesthetic quality of his work, something that became as significant as the mere number of messages and his ability to sell anything good or bad.18 The immediate visual appeal of his work—as well as his inventive curiosity, compulsive prodigiousness, and flare for theatrical storytelling— had as much to do with the power and religious suggestiveness of the art as did any particular biblical content. During Finster’s most creative period as an artist, in the 1970s through the 1980s, his odd sacred art tended to have a special appeal to all sorts of not particularly evangelical or even very religious people. This was especially true for sophisticated dealers like Phyllis Kind, who loved the outra-

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geous rawness of the imagery but not the literality of Jesus-saves biblical bombast. Better to interpret the theology with an ironic wink. Such aficionados would say that the appeal and saving grace of the work had to do with the art and the outrageous charm of the man. Not the religion. Moreover, if religion broadly conceived—or, let’s say, human religiosity or spirituality as a response to temporal contingency, rather than the social organizations called “religions”—had something to do with the work’s aesthetic appeal, then it was the unconventional, symbolically existential, emotionally suggestive, morally evocative, and visionary elements creatively expressed in the art that counted. Not the explicit evangelical ideology. There is a double irony here: some infidels from the city could embrace Finster’s art as implicitly religious and potent, while Finster’s country neighbors and fellow born-again Christians often found the work to be self-promoting, hopelessly bizarre, mostly junk-ugly, and religiously disturbing. Urbane art critics like Schjeldahl had upset stomachs, while rural Southern Evangelicals were at first more prone to devastating panic attacks. Interestingly it was only toward the end of Finster’s life, and especially after his death, that believing Christians started to embrace not only Finster’s celebrity status and artwork but also and especially the work’s connection with evangelical tradition. One result of this belated acceptance was the increasingly evangelical flavor given to the yearly “Finster fests” in the Garden (in the late 1990s and after Finster’s death), which attracted a younger contingent of evangelicals who were inclined to look past the more radical and inclusive religious aspects of Finster’s religious art and focus on a hipper, Christian-rock, yet still largely conventional, evangelical interpretation. I had my own run-in with this new evangelical reclamation of Finster when I attended one of the August emporiums of folk, outsider, and wannabe art called the Atlanta Folk Fest soon after Finster’s death. I remember meeting with two young self-taught artists and Finster fans, C. M. and Grace Laster, at the Finster booth set up by Beverly Finster. We got into an animated discussion about Finster’s legacy. We had met years before in the Garden, and I very much appreciated their love of Finster and Elvis, their resourceful intelligence, their good humor, and their own talent for creative art-making.19 The Lasters were certainly not narrow Fundamentalists, and from the time I first met them I felt that we were friends. And I still consider them as such. But that afternoon in Atlanta we veered into a discussion about some research and teaching I was doing at that time on the religious implications of the Elvis Presley cult.20 I knew they actually did a lot of

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Elvis art more or less in the manner of Finster. But I blithely assumed too much sympathy for my enthusiasm in using the cultural dynamics of celebrity movements such as the Elvis cult as a prism for understanding the emergence and divinization of religious founders like Jesus the Christ or Siddhartha the Buddha. I quickly realized by Grace’s reaction that such speculations were beyond the pale for her. Moreover, she made it plain that their ongoing devotion to both Finster and Elvis was primarily in relation to what they saw as these men’s evangelical Christian agenda and message, not the distortions of some professorial interpretation of that message. I remember at the time thinking that this was a little odd given Finster’s own messianic identity and his special attachment to an angelic Elvis. Nevertheless, it was clear that my old rapport with the Lasters, as well as some of my previous assumptions about the lack of any evangelical appropriation of Finster, had been ruptured. Despite this shift toward a more traditional evangelical understanding of Finster and his art in recent years, it was primarily the vaguely secular folk from the cities, along with assorted hipsters and infidels, who from the 1970s to the 1990s were infatuated with Finster— specifically the rough, outer-space strangeness and intensity of the art more than its explicit evangelical religion. As crude and as simplistic as some of the art appeared to be, the work often communicated something both disturbing and weirdly attractive to a self-consciously sophisticated audience. The real issue in weighing the religious and artistic aspects of Finster’s art is the necessity to avoid an overly literal approach to interpretation. To understand Finster and to appreciate the significance of his art requires, then, that the viewer take seriously the religious intentionality of the art and, at the same time, acknowledge the force of Schjeldahl’s gastrointestinal critique. For tolerant infidels with strong stomachs, this kind of aesthetic seriousness need not be equated with the literalistic and intolerant claims of some forms of evangelical religion. But it does mean that the real religious and human power of the evangelical vision of life should never be neglected. As Finster shows in his visionary and artistic redaction of the Bible, the claims of a religious intentionality cannot easily be distinguished from those of an aesthetic intentionality (and vice versa). Such an aesthetic sensitivity and practice that opens up and enlarges the conventional understanding of religion is surprising in the Southern context, but it is certainly not unheard of, as seen in the work of Flannery O’Conner, William Faulkner, R.E.M., and various other Southern writers and musicians, as well as visual artists.

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Finster’s very best works with regard to aesthetic quality were largely produced during the Tractor Enamel Period in the 1970s and 1980s, when his religious message, technical virtuosity, and visionary passion were at their height. This was the time when God, the Holy Ghost, and other spectral entities actively talked back to Finster and the Garden was full of apparitions and other wonders, a visionary interaction that diminished during the last years of his life. This situation suggests an interesting connection between artistic creativity and intense religiousvisionary fervor, even if, as Schjeldahl put it, much of the specific theological-apocalyptic content in the early period seemed often unbending and depressing. During Finster’s later career, in the 1990s and after the turn of the millennium, the visionary fever, expansive theological message, and aesthetic quality of the work were increasingly subordinate to the demands of a “signed by Howard” production for an audience of collectors, tourists, and folk art aficionados. The busyness was still there, but much of the furious passion and creativity had been lost. The articulation of an aesthetic meaningful for Finster’s work will, therefore, have to take into account the trajectory of these two phases of his career as a visionary artist. The first of these phases, which ran from the 1970s through the 1980s and into the early 1990s—what I’ve called the Tractor Enamel Period—led to his early craft and environmental work and his selftaught and swift maturation as a backwoods Blakean visionary cartoonist, a Duchampian found-object entrepreneur, a Haringesque master of raw graphic design, and a Warholian multimedia experimenter. The later phase loosely ran throughout the 1990s to his death and can be named the Sharpie/Paint Pen Period. In the final analysis, psychological obsession or visionary intensity or both—whether of uncompromising apocalyptic destruction or more ethereal scenes of heavenly glory and otherworldly exploration—have the power to produce an arresting and distinctive style of artistic expression, which in turn can lead to a particular kind of visual pleasure. Obsession (or single-minded busyness, as Pauline Finster might have called it) and its related states of creative consciousness, religious or otherwise, may therefore be taken as one important foundational criterion for an outsider aesthetic. In like manner, there should be some attempt to discriminate among the varieties of obsessive experience and expression. This involves taking into account the cultural and mediated context for these experiences, along with the similarities and important differences between, for example, mentally aberrant, visionary, mediumistic, trancelike, out-of-body,

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meditative, prayerfully willed, and pharmacologically induced forms of altered consciousness and compulsion.

passion, practice, and process While pondering the problem of evaluating Finster’s art in a way that respected its aesthetic achievements, I could not help but recall the encounter at my parents’ house in Atlanta at the end of the 1980s. The refrain “any child could make art” like Finster’s stuck with me. But the truth is that any child could not really have done what Finster had accomplished with his incredibly resourceful, religiously passionate, tirelessly prolific, and creatively inventive work. Nevertheless I was bothered by the nagging thought that the fallback position in this dispute was finally that, whatever Finster or children may have done, while perhaps interesting and beguiling in some surprising ways, is not, and cannot be, truly art. Certainly it is not fine, high, trained, masterful, or profound art of the type seen in the rise of Western civilization. Isn’t it stuff that can only be assigned to some hierarchically distinct and lower categories in the evolutionary and developmental record of human endeavor: primitive art, tribal art, children’s art, folk art, psychotic art, naive art, craft art, tramp art, outsider art, self-taught art, and so on? Trying to ascribe high-art status or even masterwork status to such bible-cartoon work seems to be an exercise in complete and utter fatuity. Then a sign appeared in the course of my brooding over these issues. Although not a rainbow, a dove, or a Holy Ghost feeling, the event nonetheless communicated a message that allowed me to move forward. In early November 2012, Lehigh University hosted a lecture as part of a semester-long exhibition titled African Visions of Barack Obama: Folk and Popular Images of America’s 44th President. This show focused on commercial art and signage reflecting the impact of Barack Obama on the African imagination (such as barbershop signs announcing a new Obama hairstyle or mock movie posters depicting Obama the Prophet in Islamic garb). The lecture was given by Henry Glassie, a scholar of folklore and art known for his research and writing on many topics, especially cross-cultural issues comparing folk and art traditions. The title of Glassie’s talk that evening was “The Spirit of Folk Art,” a topic about which he had written an award-winning book.21 First of all, Glassie is a particularly mesmerizing lecturer—more of a tribal storyteller (albeit with PowerPoint) than an academic speaker. Looking

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like Mark Twain, complete with moustache and a tricksterish glint in his eyes, Glassie did indeed work his magic that evening and movingly told an illustrated story about the practice of ceramic folk art in Japan, Turkey, Italy, and the United States (especially Southern “face jugs”). What was so powerful about this presentation was Glassie’s wellrehearsed but impassioned argument about the fundamental continuity of things like ceramic folk art, African pop art, commercial art, and, finally, just art without any adjectival qualifications. It was, in fact, his performance and message that day that reenergized my effort to articulate an aesthetic appropriate for assessing the quality of Finster’s work. Henry Glassie had given me a way to view Howard Finster’s bad and nasty works as art. In other words, Finster’s best work—whether labeled visionary, contemporary folk, self-taught, or outsider art—should be seen in a continuum with what Western art tradition conceitedly defined and set apart as “fine art.” From the sequestered perspective of traditional Western art history from roughly the eighteenth century onward, everything other than fine art was said to be something else, something qualitatively inferior, something not touched by the hand of a male Caucasian genius, something primitive, something oriental, something any child (with premature life experience, unusual creative brilliance, and preternatural hand-eye coordination) could do. Not art as compared with fine or high art sanctioned by Western museum culture. Isn’t real art the kind of art done for art’s own sake? For beauty! For purely aesthetic reasons! The other stuff was driven by utilitarian, monetary, and traditional concerns and in that sense was forever more merely a folk or craft practice designed to serve nonartistic ends, whether completely mundane, childishly simple, psychotically driven, or religiously motivated. For Glassie, those who make such canonical pronouncements miss the point of what art—prehistoric and historic, tribal and civilizational, traditional and modern, Eastern and Western, low and high—always is. And what is that? It has to do with the passionate skill to witness, and communicate, the specialness of the human condition as revealed in and through the multiple cosmic, natural, and human worlds that mythically circumscribe our ritual existence. Whatever it is, then, is something that cannot be wholly determined by a Western academic art establishment, since art at its best is never pure, one-sided, completely original, or totally self-referential. Art is, says Glassie, a way of “knowing the world” and “knowing [the world’s] superiority to our schemes.” To know and respond to the messy glory of the world is to “come to

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know art as mixed” sacramental sign systems with “a message about the wonders of impurity, as real.” To really know the world we live in is finally to see through the passionate eyes of the artist and to know that our world is but an entangled composite of many worlds from the past, the present, and beyond. So, therefore, it is “not fine, nor folk, nor primitive, not sensual nor conceptual, useless nor useful, traditional nor original.” Art simply “is.” And with a bit of a shamanistic or Daoist mystical flourish that embraces Finster and his evangelical Holy Ghost feelings, as well as many other outsider and visionary artists, Glassie romantically observes that art is, above all, “the record of our bodies bumping through the world, our wits at war with the unknowable.” It is, and Finster could certainly agree, “the story of our fumbling toward collaboration and our union with the power that moves the universe.”22 In keeping with this perspective, Glassie waggishly suggests that “fine art is the art of pale wealthy people, folk art is the art of pale poor people, and primitive art is the art of dark people.”23 Or as the maverick critic Dave Hickey once said, “Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.”24 The important point here is to avoid hierarchical distinctions about real art and folk, craft, self-taught, visionary, outsider, or Finster art. Far better is to accept the coarse continuity of various artistic practices often put definitively into different categories. The quality that makes all these practices art is the degree to which they passionately “take off from” (in reference to any technique or medium) the ordinary, mundane, superficial, utilitarian, conventional, commercial, or traditional and achieve some heightened degree of reality (which may be variously called beauty, sublimity, specialness, sacredness, strangeness, or spookiness). As Flannery O’Conner would say, art helps us see the oddness of the world and our fellow human beings. We know this world through the other worlds that give it revivalist spunk and create meaning. Art in this sense is the impassioned making of the ordinary special, the transformation of the utilitarian and commercial into something significant in relation to what it becomes or communicates. It has to do with the skilled transformation of something (anything) into a sign that elicits a significant response from the observer. An image, action, or object, really anything, becomes artistically meaningful in the crucible of technical accomplishment and passion-wrought skill. It is possible to add some additional qualifiers to this artistic continuum of things-made-special through the passionate skill of the artist and the response of the observer. Glassie also notes that the practice of

plate 1. Howard Finster, Vision of Heavens West Wing, 1984. Three-dimensional box made of wood, Plexiglas, paint, and other media, 28 x 20.3 x 3.3 inches. Artwork no. 3613. John and Susan Jerit Collection. Photograph by Robert Walch.

plate 2. Howard Finster, There is a House of Gold, 1978. Enamel paint and glitter on Masonite, 35.5 x 16 inches. Artwork no. 1271. John F. Turner Collection.

plate 3. Howard Finster, The Way of Jesus, 1982. Enamel paint and glitter on plywood, 72 x 41.5 inches. Artwork no. 2573. Lehigh University Art Gallery Collection. Photograph by Robert Walch.

plate 4. Howard Finster, Brian Scott, 1976. Enamel paint on wood, 20 x 18 inches. Artwork no. 327. © Thomas E. Scanlin Collection. Photograph by Robert Walch.

plate 5. Howard Finster, Vision Map, 1978. Enamel paint on glass, 20 x 24 inches. Artwork no. 1257. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

plate 6. Howard Finster, Howard Looks Upon a Piece of Planet, 1982. Enamel paint and glitter on wood, 50.25 x 31.25 inches. Artwork no. 2297. Photograph courtesy of the Roger Brown Study Collection of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

plate 7. Kata Billups, Howard Shows Jesus Paradise Garden, 2001. Oil on canvas, 18 x 36 inches. © Kata Billups. Girardot/LaBelle Collection. Photograph by Steven Lichak.

plate 8. Howard Finster, Wipe Rag Art, 1988. Enamel paint on cloth and wood, 22 x 15 inches. Artwork no. 8121. © Thomas E. Scanlin Collection.

plate 9. Howard Finster, The Angel Staff, 1981. Enamel paint, glitter, and burned wood, 60.625 x 28.5 inches. Artwork no. 2022. Stephanie and Robert Tardell Collection. Photograph by Robert Walch.

plate 10. Howard Finster, Vision of the Jane and Jeffrey Camp Vacation to the Planet URON, 1978. Enamel paint on wood, 45 x 63 inches. Artwork no. 1251. Private collection. Photograph by Robert Walch.

plate 11. Howard Finster, Vision of Mary’s Angel, 1987. Enamel paint on wood, 4 x 4 feet. Artwork no. 6909. Michael and Laura Palmer Aronstein Collection. Photograph by Phyllis Kind Gallery.

plate 12. Howard Finster, Visions of Holy Crystal Cities Beyond, 1985. Three-dimensional Plexiglas box and other media, 15.5 x 10.5 x 5.25 inches. Artwork no. 4266. Photograph by Barry Pribula.

plate 13. Howard Finster, Faith Goes In, 1982. Enamel paint on wood, 18.25 x 22 inches. Artwork no. 2291. Arient Family Collection. Photograph by Robert Walch.

plate 14. Howard Finster, Empty Cross Trying to Tell the World Something, 1978. Enamel paint on mirror, 19 x 27 inches. Artwork no. 1901. John Denton Collection. Photograph by Robert Walch.

plate 15. Howard Finster, Sneakers, 1981. Enamel on wood, 19.5 x 39 inches. Artwork no. 2224. John Denton Collection. Photograph by Robert Walch.

plate 16. Norman Girardot, Blue Boy Collage in the Spirit of Howard Finster, 1989. Cardboard reproduction of Thomas Gainsborough’s painting (c. 1770), paper cutouts, paint pen, and other media, 30 x 24 inches. © Norman Girardot. Photograph by Norman Girardot.

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“fine art,” as habitually used in modern Western art history since the eighteenth century, tends to be “sensual, materialistic, [and] the product of secular societies.” The practice of folk art—or in this case, Finsteresque contemporary folk, outsider, vernacular, visionary, or selftaught art—tends, on the other hand, to be more “spiritual, typological, [and to encode] a shared inner world of symbols.”25 In traditional folk, and in much contemporary folk, visionary, and outsider art, the typological structure of things, the infinitely variable and replicable selfmade template, tends to rule, as opposed to fine art’s attachment to illusory representation or some avant-garde “originality” in relation to the prevailing traditions of the mainstream art world.26 What defines traditional folk and outsider, or self-taught, art in various ways, as Glassie suggests, is a creative concern for, if not necessarily a slavish attachment to, tradition—that is, the nostalgic importance of family, home, religion, and local community in relation to one’s specific cultural time and locality. These qualities are furthermore coupled with a self-conscious or intuitive search for conventional and unconventional, explicit and implicit, aspects of sacred meaning in the midst of the profane temporality of life (the ultimate and proximate beginnings and ends of things). Most important among all these considerations is the quality of “in the moment” passion, obsessive focus, or intense attention to the process and “flow” of making, which is found throughout the cultural and temporal continuum of artistic practices. It is this intensity (running from the “optimal experience” of ritualized concentration to a kind of ecstatic involvement) that drives the craftsperson into artistry. Like Gombrich’s “control,” Glassie’s passionately perfected skill, which is tempered with tradition and spirit, moves in the direction of some extraordinary creative excellence in the handling of materials and leads “the mind behind the senses,” for both the artist and the observer, into the wonder of a “totalizing experience.”27

the tractor enamel period The issue of assessing the totalizing experience of art-making associated with masterworks within the overall body of Finster’s work is conjointly related to the manifest visionary passion, creative process, and evolving skill of the artist; the arresting nature of the art produced; and the observer’s emotions. This kind of evaluation involves a consideration of anthropological, contextual, and cultural features associated with both the artist and the audience, along with analysis of the more formal characteristics

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of the artworks themselves. Also crucial is a more precise articulation of the distinctive kind of aesthetic feelings (amazement, wonderment, bemusement, amusement, and so on) of observers reacting to the otherworldly eccentricity of many visionary and outsider artworks. Some critics have claimed that Finster’s earliest painted work, from (roughly) 1976 down to 1980 (the first thousand or so works, the earliest of which were not numbered), are the only true masterworks, since these works were the primal irruptions of his untutored artistic drive and visionary creativity.28 But in the mid-1970s, Finster had not achieved any technical artistic mastery as a painter. He had already perfected many methods in relation to his various environmental works and signs in Trion and Pennville, but in the 1970s he was only starting out as a fulltime painter of images that included figures and stories. While his early painted works laid out many of the basic images, methods, materials, techniques, texts, themes, and templates of his later, more mature art of the late 1970s and the 1980s, Finster first had to learn how to paint images using a brush and oil-based enamel. Although he had painted plenty of houses, bikes, and signs in his early career—in addition to creating wood work (clocks, toys, some furniture), doodling and note-taking constantly, making crayon sketches, and at times giving religious chalk talks—he had not painted many actual pictures before the 1970s. It was only then that, given his habits as a tinkerer-woodworker, he celebrated his tools and became intensely involved in endless experiments with paint and color (particularly in refining his “finger rubbing” method of blending colors), composition, methods, materials, and framing. Many of Finster’s early works from the 1970s show off his self-taught genius in surprisingly moving, oddly intriguing, or even sometimes amazing ways. Conversely, some display a rather muddy palette, a haphazard sense of composition, and a messy figuration. The emergent ability shown in these painted works contrasts with some other artistic forms he had already mastered through his work on the Garden—for example, his many found-object sculptural assemblages (e.g., his early “melted TV glass” diorama-like constructions and other, more elaborate narrative dioramas), lathed and burned-wood works (notably his special die-cut frames), embedded concrete works, hand-painted lattice windows for the Folk Art Church, and hand-lettered banners and signs. The real excitement and interest evident in the early work is the manifest sense of intense, at times ecstatic, involvement in the process of creation and his inventive playing with plywood, mirrors, glass, plastic, metal, and other materials. We witness in this work the unfolding of his

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rapid, self-taught mastery of compositional form, brush technique, methods of coloration, figurative drafting, collage, foregrounding and layout, eidetic discovery, the filling of all available pictorial space, and overall decorative design. So, too, we see his fascinating word-image combinations of biographical, biblical, historical, and popular subject matter. Finster’s ongoing construction of his special mythic destiny within the Edenic space of the Garden seemed to give him the heroic energy to try anything and everything artistic. Finster’s earliest works may be interesting from a developmental and visionary point of view, but in terms of technical ability they are also mostly consistent with Finster’s description of them as simply bad and nasty works of art.29 It is probably best to accept Finster’s own judgment about many of these nascent works without attempting to redeem them aesthetically and ironically as masterworks. He was admittedly learning from these works—especially the less successful ones. As he said, “I got my education from my mestakes.”30 Nevertheless, every once in a while an artistically transformative work emerged that showed a striking realization of formal aesthetic qualities. Examples of works that show his newfound mastery are There is a House of Gold (1978, see plate 2) and The Angel Staff (1981, plate 9)—both of which combine pyrographed wood, glitter, paint, and words to create captivating pictorial compositions. In the case of The Angel Staff, there is the wonderful touch of the lone skiff in a horizontal field of vibrant blue water beneath the golden glow of the wood above. Also interesting as a forecast of Finster’s ability to capture character in an extremely simple and typological, yet delicately evocative and iconlike, way is the haunting painting Brian Scott (1976, see plate 4). A somewhat later and much more refined example is the painting of Finster’s first dealers, called Vision of the Jane and Jeffrey Camp Vacation to the Planet URON (1978, plate 10). In this painting Finster achieves a notable degree of formal pictorial organization in terms of line, image, and word—as well as a flat yet efficiently balanced rendering of foregrounded figures and the dense background of fantastic, Hieronymus Bosch–like landscape imagery. Overall, this work, like a number of his well-known fourby-four-foot “vision of” paintings, displays an effectively emblematic style of frontal perspective for depicting faces, and an inventively playful compositional control of materials, medium, imagery, and message. In the 1980s Finster had a tendency to move in the direction of incorporating quite pretty, but highly stylized, painterly conventions. This is observed in several of his four-by-four-foot paintings from the 1980s—

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such as the now famous Vision of Mary’s Angel (1987, plate 11), which, though visually attractive, is somewhat routinized in relation to its frontal depiction of the central figure, the tiered mansions, and formulaic text boxes—as well as in the cerulean background sky of many flitting angels, random tiny planets, and a few token flying saucers. This is truly a beautiful and beguiling work, but it lacks the visionary edginess of some of the earlier paintings.31 Impressive throughout his artistic apprenticeship of the 1970s and early 1980s was Finster’s natural, and limitless, talent for manipulating lines, words, lettering, and graphic design. From the very beginning of his artistic ministry, he had a unique poetic flare and imaginative prolificacy for enthusiastically blending word and image in original, increasingly sophisticated, and visually remarkable ways. Often these graphically rich works made use of odd word-image juxtapositions, curious locutions, and creative misspellings with intentionally and unintentionally humorous results. Striking examples of these distinctive Finsterian traits are seen in many of the intensely crowded, lettered line drawings and creative graphic designs for Jeff Camp’s Folk Image broadsheet publication (c. late 1970s; see for example Finster’s Seven Invisible Members of Mankind and My Brain Cell Warehouse, figures 1 and 7), as well as in the endlessly varied pages for the self-published book Howard Finsters Vision of 1982 (see figure 16). Both of these works (and several of his other self-published books) are extraordinary specimens of intriguing graphic design and unusual word-image configurations. Despite Finster’s protestations about message quantity over aesthetic quality, these works show that his words and sayings quickly became more important as elements in an overall artistic design than as linguistic signs. There is often joy in reading the fractured syntax and visionary messages in works like the Folk Image broadsheet, but the impact, pleasure, and meaning comes as much from the overall visual pattern as from the written words. The works from the early Tractor Enamel Period often display visionary imagery and apocalyptic messages, but they almost always show off Finster’s need to experiment with, and to learn from, the many mediums and methods (wire, Plexiglas, mirrors, pyrography, concrete, glass, lithography, dioramas, etc.) associated with his new, full-time commitment to an artistic career. 32 In Finster’s works from the late 1970s down to the late 1980s (roughly from about the thousandth to the nine or ten thousandth painting), we witness the emergence of his unique voice, or signature style, as a self-taught visionary artist.33

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An outstanding example of Finster’s masterly three-dimensional artworks from this period is the extraordinarily beautiful Plexiglas-box diorama called Visions of Holy Crystal Cities Beyond (plate 12; see also the wood-and-glass box Vision of Heavens West Wing, plate 1). Among many other painted works are the striking pyrographed frame and symmetrical cosmos of colorful imagery and religious sentiment titled Faith Goes In (plate 13) and the especially intriguing mirror work Empty Cross Trying to Tell the World Something, which shows off Finster’s talent for combining knotted squigglelike imagery with words carrying an urgent religious message (plate 14). There is also the remarkable composition Sneakers (plate 15), which impressively displays many of his signature tendencies as an artist at this time—that is, the prominent hand-tooled frame, his penchant for an arresting blue coloration, the tripartite sea-land-sky configuration of the picture plane, and notably the entangled imagery of biblical apocalypticism (the serpents or beasts of the end-time rising up out of a sea replete with “sneaker” battleships ready for an Armageddon engagement), along with otherworldly angels, skittish animals, flying saucers, airships, stark vegetation, stylized heavenly mansions, and somewhat ominous dark planetary discs or moons. The visionary credo for the whole work is indicated by a Finsterian scribble at the top of the painting: “I believe in other worlds.”

toward a finsterian aesthetic What the first Western art historian, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), recognized long ago, and what has been cross-culturally and comparatively updated by Ernst Gombrich, Henry Glassie, and others, is that creating a great work of art requires not only a knowledge and passionate control of the technical aspects of art, whether academic or self-trained, but also a “doctrine of grace.” This is a “free gift” of the divine, the gods, the Holy Ghost, muses, visionary flight, or the creative imagination (or perhaps some combination thereof) that gives the artist “a certain license within the rules.”34 It is the ability to use one’s materials and methods freely and creatively, with a flowing passion and graceful ease, that pushes one toward the mastery of art and life. Such works provoke the wonder of an ecstatic “totalizing experience” or, transformatively, an encounter with new worlds of meaning. Amazing grace! Describing the grace of aesthetic intuition and invention is no easy matter. Nor do I pretend to have fathomed the ultimate sources of visionary ecstasy and artistic creativity—although it seems increasingly

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evident that both come from worlds right here and in outer space. It is best simply to accept the complex human and extrahuman truth of creative passion and operate with a straightforward understanding of aesthetic achievement. So “when a work of art” displays an intense “problem solving in process” and “impresses us as the highest embodiment of skill, profundity, or expressive power, we call it a masterpiece.”35 Finster’s work as a visionary mythmaker and artist was always in process as his multiple stories and technical abilities unfolded. It is possible, therefore, to specify a number of extraordinary works, even masterworks, painted during the intensely creative Tractor Enamel Period. The works depicted in this book were singled out for various reasons involving visionary inspiration as well as aesthetic, biographical, cultural, and other serendipitous factors. But what is revealed is only a tiny sampling of Finster’s best work. What constitutes aesthetic quality and makes a great or masterly work is a passionate and graceful manifestation of qualities from both formalist (visual form, composition, balance, line, color ) and contextualist (biographical, historical, religious, and cultural context) perspectives.36 A work of art impresses us as a great work or masterwork when there is a striking embodiment of formal organization and control, technical inventiveness and creative experimentation, layered cultural appropriation and unexpected metaphoric associations, and an expressive power that transports us to other worlds of experience. The response to a great work of art should in some sense be a “totalizing experience” that corresponds to the total commitment to passion and process shown by the artist who made the artwork. Recall also Glassie’s emphasis on the tendency of artists (whether called visionary, selftaught, folk, outsider, tribal or something else) marginalized in some fashion by the modern urban art establishment to exhibit an ardent concern for tradition as a shared world of symbolic and often spiritual meaning and for craft techniques that seek out and trust the hidden grain or pattern of things. It has to do with the ability to see through the visionary prism of art to a template of meaning—traditional and extraterrestrial, human and divine—in clouds, paint, concrete, and every other form of matter. The coming together of a particular configuration of qualities suggested by Henry Glassie and Roger Cardinal, along with additional formalist and contextualist perspectives appropriate to Finster as a selftaught visionary artist, can help generate what could be called an outsider aesthetic style. There have been various attempts to describe such an out-

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sider visual style and aesthetic. Most of these efforts revolve around some variation on Cardinal’s and Glassie’s concern for the role of passion, skill, and creative obsessiveness—making allowances for important differences among psychotic, ecstatic-manic, visionary, ritual-cultic, trance-reverie, autistic, Asperger-ish, or other states of passionate, surrealistic, mediumistic, or altered consciousness. This has been called the encounter with the “strangeness” or the “autistic air” of outsider art, in response to which a viewer may feel a kind of “participatory bemusement” or a “totalizing experience” of estrangement. This constitutes a “secondary enactment of the artist’s originating trance.” In the spirit of Finster’s visionary approach to art, there is a quasi-religious emotion here that is related to the implicit “invitation to share in the creative process,” if not in the artist’s own explicit religious intentionality.37 While munching on a spoonful of instant-coffee crystals and spontaneously scratching an itch, Finster might have called this shared frisson a kind of Holy Ghost feeling or perhaps even a tiny born-again experience. A more expansive way to describe this kind of outsider artistic style and the experience of the observer, especially concerning Finster, is to agree with the contention that one basic aesthetic pleasure of visionary and outsider art may be thought of as variable feelings of amazement (if not complete bewilderment).38 The point of this recognition is to strike a balance between the artist’s intentions and our own response: “We can’t look at outsider art totally on its own terms, but neither can we force ours to be the only terms.” Amazement is “an experiential, highly subjective word that is not tied to specific artistic stances.” It defines a more engaging or totalizing emotion—a “more general experiential category”—than the traditional aesthetic categories of beauty, the sublime, or even the grotesque. Moreover, we can “experience amazement at an artist’s psychological obsession,” at, for example, the “particularly inventive use of bottle caps”39 by African American artist Mr. Imagination/Gregory Warmack or at Finster’s trancelike ability to find infinite faces in clouds or in random paint drippings. Amazement (to different degrees of intensity, of course) as a way to describe the aesthetic experience of the best outsider and visionary art— along with the related emotions of surprised befuddlement, bemusement, and confusion—also has the advantage of being unstable. That is, “we have no idea where it will go and what its end point will be.” To be amazed is to be confronted by a maze of feelings loosely defined by a simultaneously confounding and pleasurable strangeness—a disorienting experience that in time may be modulated or routinized into a fond

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familiarity, vague disinterest, or even an eventual disappointment and rejection. Most of all, admitting to feelings of an initial perplexed amazement (especially “amazement without hype”) is an aesthetic response that does not inevitably lead to either a romantic aggrandizement of the artist or a denigration of the art.40 It is worth remembering that even Andy Warhol, the taciturn and often fey ironist from Pittsburgh and Manhattan, started to “label” commercial signs as pop art and recognized that the “mystery” of art may fade by so doing. But he also instinctively knew that the productive disorientation or “amazement was just starting.”41 And inasmuch as the boisterous Howard Finster made visionary artworks out of lowly materials that became signs and messages from God, he might actually agree with the shy, laconic Warhol that even Brillo boxes and Coke bottles could truly be amazing, even sacramental, art. Elvis and Marilyn Monroe too!

conclusion

Howard Finster The Hidden Man of the Heart

In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors. —William Blake

I think everybody should be nice to everybody. —Andy Warhol

I never seen a person I didn’t love on this earth planet. —Howard Finster

on the final trail I was on the Finster trail again. Having spent four days with my wife’s parents on the Florida coast, I was driving from Fort Pierce, Florida, to Atlanta in mid-January 2013. My plan was simple and in keeping with my previous research trips to north Georgia. I had set up a base of operations at my brother’s house just north of Atlanta and made several final information-gathering sorties to Summerville, Pennville, and other sites associated with the ongoing Finster legacy. I had just about finished a draft of my manuscript on Howard Finster, and I was feeling a pressing need to bring myself up to date with respect to the latest, sometimes rather convoluted, developments with the Finster family. I was also looking forward to meeting the new group who had taken over the management of Paradise Garden and to see again various Finster friends and collectors. What was especially intriguing was the sense I had gotten during the past year from various emails, phone calls, newspaper

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articles, and miscellaneous garbled reports about conflicts over the control and preservation of the Garden. I was also curious about the previous year’s short-lived, controversial play The Hidden Man, about Finster’s relationship with the young tormented artist Robert Sherer. As I drove through the early morning hours, I couldn’t help but think not only about Howard Finster and my almost completed book but also about the whole amorphous field of outsider art. During the previous few years (roughly speaking, 2004 to 2013), it appeared that Finster’s reputation, along with the larger self-taught, or outsider, movement, had entered a more convoluted phase. Much of this may relate only to the emotions of inevitable letdown after the enthusiasm and excitement in the field during the previous few decades. Nevertheless, many examples of thickening shadows in the outsider world could be cited—such as, among other things, the death of important artists and influential collector-dealers, a winnowing of galleries in key cities, and a continuing neglect of the field by major museums and academics. Even more discouraging was the debacle involving the financial collapse of the American Folk Art Museum and the sale of its signature building to its heavy-handed Fifty-Third Street neighbor in New York, MoMA.1 Fortunately, beginning in 2013, the tide seemed to turn and there were increasing indications of newfound interest in the whole outsider realm both nationally (e.g., the partial revival of the American Folk Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s increased support, the ongoing health of Raw Vision, and the continuing success of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore) and internationally (e.g., James Brett’s hypereclectic Museum of Everything, the Encyclopedic Palace at the 2013 Venice Biennale, and the new International Journal of SelfTaught and Outsider Art sponsored by the University of Sydney). However, questions linger about whether such events are really major “breakthroughs” or only “bubbles” that suggest little real progress toward a truly borderless vision of art.2

seeking closure Despite the ups and downs of Finster’s reputation since the time of his death, there are numerous signs of a renewed appreciation of his accomplishments and ongoing significance (such as film and theatrical productions, a major traveling exhibition, the new Paradise Garden Foundation, and a dramatic upsurge in the value of his early tractor-enamel works). All these thoughts and emotions rattled through my head as

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I drove back to Finsterland. I even started to think, no doubt foolishly, that this could be my last visit to this odd but surprisingly compelling place in north Georgia. After a couple of decades of involvement with Finster himself, more than a decade of postmortem pondering, and three and a half years of intermittent writing, I needed to bring my manuscript about this mysterious stranger from another world to a close. I was, I hoped, at the trail’s end, and my story needed some kind of appropriate termination. With some trepidation about what I would find at this time, in January 2013 (knowing about Pauline Finster’s continuing decline and the feuding between different groups claiming ownership of the Garden and stewardship of Howard Finster’s legacy), I found myself brooding about many of these issues while heading into Atlanta from Florida on Interstate 75. I happened to be listening to an audiobook of Tom Wolfe’s new novel, Back to Blood (2012), about the social dynamics of Cubans and Anglos as associated with pornography, wealthy Russian oligarchic criminals, psychiatric foolishness, and the go-go world of the insufferably pretentious and nouveau riche Miami art scene. I am reminded that, aside from Wolfe’s impressive ability to capture the flamboyant sound and spirit of Miami life, I was particularly captivated by a passing reference to the playwright Tom Stoppard’s comment, in a play he wrote in 1972, that “modern art was imagination without skill.”3 There is clearly some truth in this observation, and Wolfe gleefully and maliciously alludes to it in his merciless descriptions of the art-festival world in Miami. However, I couldn’t help but reflect on some obvious exceptions to the rule. Most blatant was Tom Stoppard himself as someone who brilliantly combined literary skill and imagination, although it could be said that he was restricting his comments to the Duchampian turn in the visual arts. More telling was what was closer to my own concerns. Thus I immediately thought about Andy Warhol, the inventor of modern, Brillo-box pop art in the 1960s, definitely someone Stoppard might have been thinking about in the early 1970s. The larger truth about Warhol is, nonetheless, that he actually had, in addition to his marketing genius, real technical skill in artistic draftsmanship, unusual coloration, and bewigged theatrical presentation. It also crossed my mind that the any-child-can-do-it Howard Finster in fact had intuitive talent and real handcrafting skill in creative image-making, striking graphic composition, and resourceful assemblage. Warhol’s and Finster’s power as artists—one conventionally trained and the other wholly self-taught— was that their best work as artistic-sign makers and salesmen displayed

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a skill that was truly congruent with, and expressive of, their respective imaginative and commercial visions. Both Warhol and Finster understood that being an artist, prophet, salesman, or entrepreneur requires the effective and practiced linking of skill and imagination. Both knew instinctively the need to be “amazing” and call attention to themselves, as a flamboyant preacher-artist or a world-weary impresario-producer. Both were showmen who got a message out (whether religiously biblical or nihilistically pop) that produced a response. Finster and Warhol were unusually skilled sign makers who made multiple copies of their hit works. Each had a special talent for dramatic self-promotion and effective marketing. In Warhol’s case these principles emphasized the production of infinitely replicable simulacrums of a Brillo box or Campbell’s soup can that seemed exactly like their actual namesakes. Except that they were not. They were real fakes like all real art. And for Finster, producing hundreds of cutout-template images that crudely replicated a Life magazine photo of Elvis at three, there is a similar attention to the craft of visual response rather than the skills of drafting. There actually is not very much difference between Finster’s “dementions,” or template reproductions (based on the biblical idea of similitudes), and Warhol’s iconic simulacrums and silk screens. Indeed, the method and intent behind (to take but one example) Finster’s cutout Coke bottles and his several giant, painted, plastic-bottle replicas were anticipated by, and created in the branded or trademarked spirit of, Warhol’s painted Brillo-box sculptural reproductions in the early 1960s. Both made the original commercial objects into signifying artworks with a new religious and/or aesthetic message—as well as an enhanced monetary value. Something amazing really had taken place. No matter how secular, sullen, nihilistic, and even antireligious Warhol appeared, the truth was that he harbored deeply rooted religious feelings and practices (he was a member of the Ruthenian Eastern Rite Catholic Church), which started to come out publicly in his art late in his life. Although the cultural contexts were quite different, Warhol’s otherworldly ennui was in many ways not dissimilar to Finster’s mission as a stranger on this planet. Both lived their lives as ritual performances that channeled their obsessive artistic passion for realizing their mythic visions of themselves and the world. Both were entrepreneurial storytellers, impresario-tricksters, and promoter-artists. The Factory and the Garden were likewise spaces, or alternative worlds, that grounded their various mythologies. Both men drew upon conventional religious traditions (Eastern Rite Catholicism and Southern Evan-

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gelical Protestantism), but both implicitly produced a kind of implicitly religious signage-art that creatively stretched conventional categories of organized religion.4 These thoughts punctuated my listening to Wolfe’s novel. But it was finally the drone of the highway, along with the melodious resonance of Lou Diamond Phillips’s voice reading Wolfe’s Back to Blood, that gave rise to an even more profound reverie as I drove. Fifty to a hundred miles south of Atlanta I found myself in a semi-trancelike state while focusing on the fantastic walls of gigantic billboards that flashed past my car with strobe-light intensity. Running this gauntlet of advertising called forth a response as my eyes registered the multitude of different signs trumpeting the presence of peach, peanut, and pecan farms (insistently the Ellis Brothers); guns and tactical gear; Chick-fil-A; discount fireworks (Crazy Steve’s Billions and Billions of Fireworks); adult bookstores, stripper clubs, Harley hogs, McDonalds, and (of course) Jesus will come again! Watch out! He’s coming! Billions and billions of roadside crosses and fireworks! Crosses everywhere! Single and triple crosses. RaceTrac and QT gas stations, Zaxby’s, Luv’s, Spinx convenience stores, Cracker Barrel, Big Zac’s, Motel 6, Sonny’s Real Pit Barbecue, Red Roof Inn, Shoe Warehouse, Super 8, Waffle House, pralines, Triple X Gentlemen’s Club, Olive Garden, discount cigarettes, boiled peanuts! Sex, lust, Jesus, gluttony, guns, diesel fuel, burgers, rugs, and free samples! Greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride! Also, “Our State Isn’t an Ashtray.” Natural hormone replacement therapy! Lazik surgery! And always, Jesus saves! A really big garish LED board trumpeting Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ!” He’s coming! Real soon now! These huge insistent placards cluttering the sides of the highway are the exaggerated contemporary equivalents of the earlier See Rock City painted on barn roofs; the roadside Burma Shave, Drink Coca-Cola, and Mail Pouch Tobacco ads; and the ubiquitous ‘Jesus Saves’ signs and crosses from the 1940s through the 1960s that so moved Finster. Much of the relatively simple innocence, moral rectitude, and plain wonder of those earlier signs was lacking in these new, shouting emblems of dumb damnation, carnal desire, tubs of soda-pop gluttony, and the inherent fear of decrepitude and death. For both eras, desire was ever present. The seven deadly sins had become effective advertising slogans. Nevertheless, at least here in the South a great big old squint-eyed Jesus still hovered over this glut. Amid all of the unbridled desire, rampant depravity, and relentless creeping kudzu, Jesus and Bible-passage signage still seemed to hold out the possibility of some saving grace along with the boiled

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peanuts, adult book stores, groves of pecan trees, and billions of fireworks. Feeling strangely cleansed in the caffeine-laced blood of the lamb, and looking forward to my return to Finster’s deteriorating garden paradise, I drove on through the night, musing on what was to come. The next morning I visited Thelma Finster Bradshaw (often called T. J.) and her husband, G. C., in Conyers, Georgia, just a little outside of Atlanta. Finster’s widow, Pauline, who was now living with Thelma, had visibly declined since I last saw her. (And as I was to learn the week after I wrote this paragraph, Pauline had, on March 22, 2013, at age ninetyfour, gone on to join Howard on some far distant celestial planet.)5 I tried to engage Pauline in a discussion about my previous visit and the importance of her comment about Finster being the busiest man she had ever known, but all I got was a wan smile as she drifted off to sleep. I was able, however, to catch up on family gossip and learned that Beverly had mostly distanced herself from the group led by the Reverend Tommy Littleton, which had been working to preserve Paradise Garden. Thelma and G. C. made it clear that they had positive feelings about the newer group, the Paradise Garden Foundation, which had taken over the management of the Garden. This bittersweet conversation only whetted my curiosity about what I would encounter up in Summerville and at the Garden, in Pennville.

down in the hole Driving down Route 27 to Paradise Garden, in Pennville on a brisk January day, I found that, despite the general poverty of Chattooga County, the area seemed to be doing relatively well: it now had an enlarged Walmart and various new fast-food joints along the road. Even the local favorite, Armstrong’s Bar B Q, was still in business, although it was closed that day. I pulled up to the new office for the Paradise Garden foundation, which had taken over a simple one-story house across the street from the old entrance to the Garden. Here, I was greeted by Jordan Poole, the new executive director of the foundation, a winsome young man with enthusiastic eyes, a winning friendliness, and real experience with artistic and architectural preservation. Poole clearly enjoyed his work in the Garden and seemed to delight in discoursing about the philosophical and technical aspects of preservation theory.6 Despite his degree from the very hip Savanna School of Art and Design and his work on George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Poole was not an interloper in Finsterland. He had grown up in nearby Sum-

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merville and clearly relished this opportunity to return home and to do something creative and life-giving for the Finster legacy and the region. I was happy to see that Poole had brought along one of my old acquaintances from Finster’s heyday. This was a smiling Larry Schlachter, who lived just down the highway, in Cloudland, ran a folk art gallery, and for many years sponsored a weekly flea market along the highway between Summerville and Pennville. Schlachter was on the board of the new foundation, and as an old friend he was clearly excited to tell me about what was happening at the Garden. After lunch, and after filling me in on the recent grants the foundation had won to preserve and refurbish the Garden, Poole and Schlachter were eager to show me some of the results of their restoration work. I ended up spending the rest of the day on the grounds, where I saw that, while there was still an immense amount of work to be done, they had started to turn things around. The early mosaics on the west side, and several walkways, were in the process of being cleaned and bleached; various creeks running through the property had been opened up; the house behind the mosaics that Howard had called Pauline’s house had been cleared out to serve as a staging area for the preservation and archival work, and the sagging rolling-chair gallery had been shored up and stabilized.7 The central structure in the Garden, the World’s Folk Art Church, had already been secured through the efforts of the group headed by Littleton, the Baptist minister from Birmingham. To my eyes all of these efforts seemed promising, but as I quickly learned, there were those who were skeptical about the speed and methodology of those who were undertaking the preservation.8 Littleton’s group, which had tried to maintain the Garden after Finster’s death, especially in keeping with Finster’s Christian evangelical spirit as Littleton understood it, was being replaced by the new foundation. Flush with a major grant from ArtPlace America, the foundation was largely made up of local people who saw the garden not only as an important artistic site honoring Howard Finster but also as contributing to the economic development of the region. Another person involved in the intrigue surrounding the Garden was the Chicago art dealer David Leonardis, who had created the Howard Finster Vision House museum and gallery in the house where he claims Finster received his transformative finger-face vision in 1976.9 Sadly this situation had spawned a rancorous dispute between the two main groups, represented primarily by Littleton and Poole, and after conversations with them it quickly became clear that I had better focus on description rather than judgment. At that

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time in the Garden (January and later in May and October 2013), any kind of collaborative reconciliation between the two groups seemed almost impossible. With respect to the many years of controversy over the shifting ownership and upkeep of Finster’s Garden, the inherent problem still had to do with the serpents of desire and self-interest that were let loose in the original Garden of Paradise. As Tom Waits tells us, keeping the snaky devils way down in the hole is never easy, and it seems particularly characteristic of the age we live in that they just keep on pokin’ their heads out again, grinning and winking.

a new ark The final account of the aftermath of these ongoing developments at the Garden will be told by someone else.10 Here my story as it impinges upon Finster’s story comes to an end as the Garden awaits deliverance. The truth is that, at this twilight moment, feelings about the Garden are torn between the hope for renewal and the darker emotions associated with broken promises, natural decay, and human conflict. As the astute Finster collector Thomas Scanlin has said, the problem of bringing the Garden back to life and truly honoring Howard Finster is not a matter of simply stabilizing, archiving, and preserving the property in its dispirited condition. The issue is how to bring the Garden truly back to some semblance of its previous vibrant life, so that the water, sap, blood, and creative spirit can flow again. The genius of what Finster did was to imaginatively and indefatigably combine his prophetic vision with his human skill for transforming the cast-aside things of the world into strange material signs and stories of hope. These creative accomplishments were coupled with his acute awareness that his individual human artwork of redeemed junk needed always to be rooted in God and nature’s own organic art. There needed to be some semblance or material sign of the original Eden—a roadside repository of wonders and all the amazing natural panoply of life. It would be a storied or mythic land full of strange life-giving signs and art. How to recapture the vibrancy, color, variety, and organic luxuriance of material existence on this garden planet? In keeping with the memory of Howard Finster’s original template, how is it possible to recreate a place that gathers all the wondrous and wild inventions of humankind as well as all the miracles of nature? How, then, while striking a balance between preservation of the past and rehabilitation in relation to the future, does one regenerate some of

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the original “lushness” (Scanlin’s evocative expression) of Finster’s garden as an environmental sign and symbol of the larger possibilities for the human community? The problem is that in the years devoid of Finster’s personal attention, the redeemed or significant junk, the storied and meaningful art of the garden, largely reverted to meaningless junk again. The art of the garden as a privileged space for the flora and fauna of life—as well as a repository of creative visions, stories, dreams, and a Holy Ghost spirit—had been lost. To recover it will require something fresh and new and unexpected. Something surprising and different and strange will again move, breathe, sing, and grow in the garden. Some new creative vision is required. Part of the answer is surely that the Garden need not again be exactly like it was when created by the Second Noah. It could become an inspirational place that honors and remembers Finster’s visionary stories and artistic achievements, but one that does not strive to cast them in the golden glow of amber. How, then, to evoke the world that sprang from the burning vision and crafty hands of Finster back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; and more important, how to tell a new story responsive to the Garden of the twenty-first century? How is it possible to re-create a new spiritual ark of art for this brave new digital world of global terror, dystopian malaise, and the zombie apocalypse? This new Paradise Garden story and environment would in the best sense, I believe, incorporate aspects of Finster’s surprisingly expanded and inclusive Christian vision. It would draw upon stories of the biblical Eden, but it would also creatively incorporate all other paradisiacal realms imagined on this and other planets. Re-creation, like recreation, is always playfully storied, mythic, carnivalesque, and ritualistic. It requires the skills and good humor of many artists. But it also requires the special shamanistic and prophetic talents of a new Noah, a new stranger from a world beyond this one. That is, it requires a theatrical storyteller who knows how to make real those visionary tales, those myriad healing messages of hope and damnation written in the Bible, in the sky, and on signs everywhere. Finster’s challenge to us is this: do we have the courage to take what he has given us and creatively craft it into something that has fresh spirit and life? In evangelical terms, perhaps there needs to be a good, old-time revival of spirit that imaginatively responds to the new conditions of the current age. It is well to recall here what is central to the shaman’s role as a paradigmatic outsider, sky-traversing visionary, trickster-performer, and wounded healer, whether we mean a shaman in tribal society or in the latter-day sense of a shamanistic Christian artist like Finster: “The

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shaman is not a private mystic, but exists to serve a community. An important part of the shaman’s role is to regulate and assist the conservation of the community’s soul force.”11 This kind of creative soul-work and community work can be a collaborative, eclectic, and cross-cultural effort. as suggested by the World’s Folk Art Church and the rolling-chair gallery set up to house the works of all those inspired by Finster’s vision. But, granting the communitarian aspects of the renewed Garden, it is also true that there need be a new artist of matter and spirit, some new entrepreneurial salesman and minister of religious and economic hope who will facilitate the manifestation of a regenerated environment. The future life of the Garden as the creative invocation of the Finster legacy should not be an easy matter of choosing between either a Disneyfied commercial operation or some kind of Christian evangelical theme park. The encouraging news is that the current efforts of Jordan Poole and the new foundation are successfully threading the needle of authenticity and sustainable functionality. In Finster’s powerfully inclusive vision of a Garden for all, commercial interests quite properly came together with religious concerns. In the best sense, both religion and commerce ought to work together to produce artistically provocative signs of the difficult interrelationship of sadness and joy, selfishness and compassion, in human life. To achieve the “best of all possible worlds” is to realize, quoting Voltaire’s Candide, that at the end of the day, century, or millennium we should “cultivate our own garden.” And then we will operate, like Finster, as gardeners or stewards of inventive recycling, not as conquerors. With the prophetic inspiration of some new stranger from yet another world showing the way, we all may share in the sacred task of caring for this garden planet and for each other. This is the dream, the vision, the myth. Of course, the full truth of this vision is that those damnable snakes are still down there in their hidey-holes.

a sign appears While reflecting on these matters as I toured the Garden with Jordan Poole that sunny but cool January day, I mentioned my special delight in building the Lehigh Memorial Sculpture and recounted other anecdotal aspects of my long involvement with Finster. In the course of this extended conversation, I happened to refer to the doctored reproduction of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy painting attributed to Finster. Bill Swislow, on his Interesting Ideas website, had called it one “that got away.” According to

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Swislow, it was one of Finster’s masterworks that had forever disappeared into the chaotic vortex of natural decay and stolen work toward the end, and aftermath, of Finster’s life.12 I confessed to Poole that my interest in this missing work was prompted by the fact that I had actually made it and given it to Finster as a thank-you gift for his inspiration. Poole unexpectedly said something like: “Well, would you like to see it?” I was dumbfounded to discover that Poole and his team had recently uncovered such a work in their salvage and archival efforts in the Garden. Taking me to a building in the Garden where they were storing and protecting some of the special artworks and other artifacts uncovered in the restoration process, I was delighted to see the altered version of my mother’s old Blue Boy reproduction that I had given to Finster more than twenty years earlier (plate 16). We found it propped against a back wall and covered with grime and mold, and we brought it out into the daylight. I took several not very good pictures of it with my cell phone. I focused particularly on the almost illegible caption on the bottom right corner of the painting and the long, mock biblical inscription on the back that indicated my role in producing this work—something that had not been noticed by the archival team.13 Poole seemed intrigued with the revelation of a new provenance for this work. I could not help but be pleased by this unexpected discovery. Keep in mind that as I was writing in the spring of 2013, I was admittedly waiting for some kind of sign—a rainbow, a dove, seventeen-year cicadas, or some warm Holy Ghost feeling that would tell of Finster’s ongoing fate on this planet if not on other planets. I suppose, with a wink to the Blues Brothers, I was also thinking back to Beverly’s declaration that her father had spoken from the celestial realms to guide my work. I could not, therefore, prevent myself from interpreting the sudden appearance of my version of The Blue Boy as an otherworldly sign that I was truly coming to the end of my narrative. No other signs or symbols from this or any other planet were required, although obviously many, many others were possible. My journey on the long and winding Finster trail seemed finally to be drawing to a close.

the hidden man of the heart In the course of my journey, I had discovered various signs of what Finster called the hidden man of the heart.14 For Finster this expression referred to each person’s hidden destiny and promise. To know the hidden man (or woman) was to discover one’s true self or talent or story.

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This is a transformative awareness that unexpectedly emerges like a butterfly from a larva and then from the translucent womb of a chrysalis. It may well be that most of us will never encounter our inner butterfly. After all, it may have little relation to the personality and behavior one ordinarily projects to the world. And here it is helpful to recall what Finster said about his own visionary hidden man that he fully realized only in his finger-face revelation: “Like there’s something in you and you hadn’t never discovered it. Like me, you see. When it said ‘do sacred art’ well, it was in there, but I hadn’t never discovered it. That’s the hidden man of the heart.” The power of discovering one’s hidden man and then acting on it is that “if the people on this planet Earth would bring out the hidden man of the heart, there’s no tellin’ what’s in some of ’em.”15 In this passage Finster speaks of an impersonal “it” that spoke to him about his real prophetic-artistic destiny, a locution that gives me some license to interpret the universal agent of such transformative events as the Greek muses, the winged messenger/trickster god Mercury, or the mercurial Holy Ghost. Whatever—as my students would say! The crucial point is that it certainly has something to do with what is discovered about the potentiality of one’s own mind and heart. And this discovery makes an important difference in relation to how one creatively interacts with, and inspires, other human beings to find out about their own hidden men or women. The theme of the hidden man of the heart has significant bearing on who Finster was at the end of his life—after his long career of creatively making his whole life into a work, or mythic assemblage, of narrative, theatrical, and visual art. Who was Howard Finster? What or who was his hidden man? The answer in his case seems related—as it does with especially creative and charismatic individuals—to an affirmation of the hidden butterfly of dreams and the various hidden men of the heart. In Finster’s case, one of these butterfly men was clearly the painter of sacred art, as revealed by the strange talking face on his paint-smeared finger. But other hidden personalities emerged before and after that event: evangelical preacher, family man, craftsman, tinkerer, trickster, visionary, storyteller, showman, musician, prophet, shaman, saint, salesman, and stranger. Also God’s garbage man and someone who invited everyone he ever met to find his or her own heart and art. As he often said, “I never met a person I didn’t love.” Even more astounding was that he seemed to really mean it, even when it went against the conventional Southern evangelical perspective on these matters. Of course, he could get angry at those who directly wronged him,

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his family, or his bottom line.16 But concerning the vast majority of God’s misshapen humanity, he could honestly say that he loved them, even more if they helped get the message out. Even those pesky infidels and Buddhas. Some might still say: Such a crazy old man! But these various hidden men were never fractured, warring, or schizophrenic personalities and dysfunctional visions. They all came together in the most creative, amazing, and busily productive way. What is certain is that Finster was an extraordinary man. Religiously speaking, he was fully human yet, at the same time, truly the Stranger from Another World. The stories about Finster’s hidden man, or men, are legion. Let me, however, recount one last tale, one that cuts to the quick. I refer to a recent theatrical production of Pamela Turner and Russell Blackmon’s Hidden Man in Georgia (February 29–March 4, 2012, in Athens, and March 12–25, 2012, in Atlanta).17 Based on a real event and somewhat foreshadowed by an earlier unproduced script called “The Real Howard Finster,”18 the Hidden Man tells the troubled story of the country boy Robert Sherer (just “Robert” in the play but based on the real artist Robert Sherer). In the early 1980s, Robert comes to Atlanta while struggling with his public identity as an anguished gay man, a drugged-out punk rocker, and a confused art student. Finding it difficult to deal with his life and his art school roommate, Charlie, in the big city of Atlanta, and while contending with suicidal thoughts, he hears about Howard Finster’s bucolic Paradise Garden. Prompted by Charlie, he makes his way north to Pennville to find some refuge and healing. The premise is that the religious Finster was the very antithesis of Robert’s suicidal nihilism. In the play, Finster is able to act as a kind of spiritual and artistic mentor whose loving acceptance helps Robert reenter the land of the living. Because of the folksy soul-work Finster accomplishes—as augmented by what the play depicts as his shadowy, showy, and distinct alter ego as a stranger from the sky who periodically becomes manifest—the haunted and suicidal Robert is able to realize his hidden destiny. Despite biblical condemnations of homosexuality, expressed in the play as a Temple of Sodomy in the garden (a crude assemblage made up of a large mirror, glass shards, and scrawled scriptures about homosexual lust from the Book of Romans),19 Robert finds himself swapping stories with the old master. The two men realize that they have, in common, both stories about the incongruous pain and comic joy of life and their own personal strangeness. In the course of what becomes their shared narrative, Robert comes to know that he is truly loved by Finster for

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what he is as a man. Struggling with his destructive demons, he’s able to affirm his will to live. He embraces his own “difference” in terms of his sexuality and his destiny as an artist. At the end of the play, Finster tells Robert that it’s time to leave the Garden and find his hidden man of the heart. In real life, Robert Sherer went on to become a successful teacher and an internationally known, albeit controversial, artist.20 By the 1970s, Finster had been consistently and soulfully eccentric for many years.21 He had always been a theatrical personality. What was interesting, charismatic, and dramatic about Finster was the mostly complete alchemical fusion of his various mythic personae. This was especially the case when he accepted the visionary commission as an artist, but the “stranger” theme went back to the time of his childhood reverie about his dead sister, Abbie Rose. These visionary experiences also recalled many of his out-of-body experiences and shamanistic dreams of flying joyfully in the sky. It is true that he enjoyed (sometimes hammy) play-acting with an audience, but Finster and what the Hidden Man calls “the stranger” were not two different persons. Finster the eccentric and theatrical stranger in life was pretty much the same as the domestic Finster in relation to his family, his local community, and his church congregations.

warm infidel chicken Not having seen a theatrical production of Hidden Man, I cannot render an overall judgment on the play as dramatic art. I do want, however, to comment on the controversy that ensued when Beverly Finster was informed about its first production in Athens. Not at all surprisingly, given conventional evangelical feelings and local Southern attitudes about homosexuality, Beverly was incensed that her father would be the subject of what she felt was a pornographic play that “glorified” a gay life style.22 The unfortunate side of this controversy was the failure to recognize Finster’s acceptance of anyone who came to the Garden, whether gay, non-Christian, secular, or otherwise. There’s no glorification of homosexuality in the play, but instead a portrayal of Finster’s loving concern for anyone who suffers because of their difference, something that Finster had also experienced. It is not that Finster approved of homosexuality, but he knew that sexual differences were very much present in God’s enigmatic garden on this earth planet. In some mysterious way, it was all part of the strange glory and ambiguous complexity of divine creation. Finster’s inspirational and healing power was deeply

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rooted in his total openness to the fallenness of the world and human nature. And this was a judgment not about homosexuality but about our haste to prematurely and destructively condemn a fellow human being. A poignant illustration of Finster’s feelings about these matters is seen in the encounter between Finster and the famous Beat poet and outspoken gay advocate Allen Ginsberg. This took place at an exhibition of Finster’s work in New York in 1989, when Ginsberg asked the curator of the show, John F. Turner, to arrange for a meeting with Finster. Ginsberg had already been down to visit Paradise Garden but had not had a chance to see Finster at that time, and he was interested in finally meeting up with the Georgia preacher-artist. While fascinated with Finster’s work, Ginsberg was at the same time curious to test Finster’s real attitudes about homosexuality—especially since he had heard that Finster believed that AIDS was “God’s revenge” on gay people. Insisting that he be introduced to Finster as a homosexual poet who “was born that way,” Ginsberg was won over by Finster’s straightforward response. As Turner tells the tale, Finster at first paused and then looked directly at Ginsberg and simply said, “What is, is.”23 What will be, will be. Finster knew that real healing comes most effectively through compassionate acceptance rather than strident damnation.24 From a traditional evangelical perspective, Finster would no doubt have preferred to see his acceptance of someone like the suffering Robert Sherer lead to a religious or heterosexual conversion. But Finster was hardly conventional in these matters of the heart. Both the fictional and the real Robert did, after all, experience life-affirming transformations. It is simply that this change involved Robert’s ability finally and fully to accept himself as he was. What is, is. Finster’s different kind of evangelical love helped Robert know his hidden man in all its spiritual and carnal difference. While in his early art Finster might have hurled anathemas upon the generic sinfulness of the world, he never condemned individual sinnerpersons who curiously sought out him and his garden of art and regenerative creativity. As he wrote about himself on one of his innumerable thought cards from the early 1980s, “Howard loves and cares for all people. He welcomes all personiality all races both good and bad. Howard don’t ask many questions specially about peoples personal life or how they live.” The heart of the issue is that, no matter how seemingly depraved or wicked, everybody could freely enter into the Garden and read the signs for themselves. And if so moved, anyone could contribute to the ark of art represented by the Folk Art Church

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and the rolling-chair gallery. Reminiscent of the spirit of the play Hidden Man, Finster tells us that, despite what others may say about him, he always had the same compassionate “story for all.”25 Finster’s own marginality allowed him, his visionary religion, and his storied art to embrace compassionately everyone who sought out his scruffy paradise on earth. As he once declared to a reporter from the neighboring town of Rome, Georgia, “The Bible don’t teach us to condemn.” And he went on to say that he didn’t “even condemn infidels,” since he had a lot of infidels who were his “friends.” The impact of this unconditioned acceptance of all the fallen people of this world was that it led to a powerful reciprocity. His love of anyone (whether “infidels, atheists, or American communists”) who entered the Garden was such that it led them to respond with gifts of the heart. As Finster declared, “They bring me warm chicken.”26 And you know what? This “infidel chicken” was just “about the best [he] ever ate.”27

the end is nigh Like Finster at the end of the 1990s, I am feeling that I’m at the end of my days. And unlike Finster’s visionary certainty, I’m not very sure that I have been able to recognize my own hidden man. But I expect no more messages from God or Beverly. And no more cryptic communications are possible from Pauline—although I suppose I can’t totally rule out some dreamy dispatches from beyond. Nevertheless, I am hopeful that there will be some new signs marking out my own continuing journey to other worlds. To some extent I find myself thinking again of my earlier mentors in the arts of the strange. What comes to mind—especially with regard to issues concerning the sinuous way forward in a life of unexpected change and unanticipated transformation—is the ancient Chinese stranger from another world, the Daoist sage Zhuangzi. It was Zhuangzi who told us he once dreamt he was a butterfly who knew how to flit and flutter around happily in the sky doing as he pleased. In this reverie, he didn’t know that he was Zhuangzi. When he suddenly woke up, “there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.”28 The gist of this little fable for me (and putting aside all of its echoes throughout Chinese tradition) is not that life is only a dream. That has been a common interpretation of the fable, especially from a Buddhist

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perspective. But I think in this case it is best to stick to a more down-toearth Daoist visionary outlook. Perhaps it’s also something that comes close to a Southern Highlands view of these matters. This perspective suggests that the crux of the parable has to do with the different roles we play in our very material and bodily lives on this earth, those stories that we unconsciously and consciously play out in sleeping and waking consciousness. I mean those myths, visions, and role-playing actions that define us even though we tend to take them for granted. But this parable can also refer to those other, more unusual and transformative moments in life, when the stories dramatically change for better or worse. Those altered moments of ordinary consciousness when such changes, and the stories told about them, become real, depending on the time and neverending imaginative flux of life. It is true that some special or marginal individuals—shamanic storytelling artists like a Zhuangzi or a Finster, for example—are acutely aware of this “Transformation of Things” and actively and expressively give the rest of us a glimmer of the secret. The secret is as plain as day and night: that is, dreams and waking life are aspects of human experience that are both different and distinct. Yet they are at the same time, and in time, hopelessly and interactively entangled. And that’s the crazy sanity of things. It is the perspectival template of life. The Transformation of Things. While wandering through the Garden of All the Inventions of Humankind in this Year of the Lord 2013, I realized I’ve never been quite sure whether Howard Finster was what he said he was. Or what the distinction was among his dreams, his visions, and his life. There ought to be some distinction. Who was he? A man, a butterfly, a preacher, an artist, a trickster-cheetah? All of that, no doubt. A saint or a shyster? Divinely ecstatic or simply wacky? He was certainly a dreamer and a visionary. And a performer, prophet, storyteller, salesman, sign maker, and mythmaker. Yes, that too. He really did know how to fly and soar, turning cartwheels and flitting and fluttering in the sky. And that is the Way of Things for prophets and those rare individuals in human life who have been touched by visions and spirits. They are the ones who know the distinction between dreams and life, as well as their fundamental interaction. All these factors came together in Finster’s themes of the Prophet Noah, the Second Adam, the stranger, the friend of the Holy Ghost and Elvis, the Man of Visions, the outer-space explorer, and the hidden man of the Heart. I am convinced that Finster—no matter what planet he is on these days, and despite obvious differences in their respective worldviews—

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would feel right at home with the old Daoist mystic and storyteller Zhuangzi. Most of all, both of them had a sense of humor and joy about their brief sojourn in this broken world. Both were visionary wanderers who incessantly told stories, assumed multiple identities, and cared deeply for the human community. Each in his way creatively changed the world. I know not whether I have fulfilled the mission communicated to me through Beverly Finster’s dream about her father. But I do know that I found some delight and insight along the trail. But many questions remain. If I have not always been able to find satisfying answers to questions about Howard Finster, I have at least set out the issues in all their perplexing and provocative ambiguity. I end, therefore, with something that has no real answer but does frame some of the larger questions connected with the interrelation of religion and art that have run throughout this narrative. I refer to the not entirely silly question of whether Howard Finster, in the midst of all his frantic busyness, actually did in a way—ignominiously and messianically—die for our sins. We know that recapturing the real presence or spiritualmaterial lushness of Finster in the broken garden he left behind is fraught with problems. It appears that there really can be no second coming of Finster, although it is worth remembering that there has been a second burial.29 Whether or not others like Zoroaster and Elvis also redemptively died in acts of some kind of universal atonement is a thorny issue for another time and place. As for Finster, however, the incongruous prophetic and messianic implications are too obvious to be endlessly deferred. Finster, while simultaneously weeping and smiling, most surely did give of himself for others, as well as for himself. There was energetic joy in it. But it was also truly painful and ultimately consumptive. He was acutely conscious and appreciative of the burdens of fame as a fate that allowed him to get his message out, but at the same time his increasing celebrity as an artist represented a heavy sacrifice. Whatever glory came with his fame was more than offset, he has told us, by the constant demands on his time, his family, and his health.30 No rest, not even much sleep, for the weary. Moreover, in Finster’s case his overwhelming busyness and commitment to getting the job done prevented him— throughout his career as preacher, tinkerer, and artist—from taking anything more than a small catnap augmented by spoonfuls of cheap instant coffee with a peanut-butter chaser. His sacrificial destiny largely ruled his life. His fate as a mythic scapegoat became even more intense when, in full recognition of his hidden man of the heart as the visionary

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Stranger from Another World, this fate finally fused in the 1970s with his conjoined messianic, prophetic, and artistic ministry. This sacrificial fusion of atoning personae was something most poignantly portrayed in They Used My Cross to Crucify (figure 20), Finster’s painting of himself crucified on a cross in the upside-down manner associated with Saint Peter. This crude yet haunting work, so different from many other happier renditions of Finster’s visage, is an early work (his 395th painting) dating to late 1976 to early 1977, soon after the transformative vision of 1976. He was clearly starting to feel the first pangs of a growing regional and national fame, as well as the burden of his special strangeness. It is telling, then, to see how in this work he interprets his situation within the context of the biblical narrative of sacrificial persecution and crucifixion. While there is obviously a symbolic messianic assimilation of Jesus’s crucifixion, in which he sees himself—as indicated on the painting—as “ready to be offered” on a hopelessly fractured cross, he is also self-consciously sensitive about claiming too much of a full Christological identification. Most critical in this regard are the cautioning words that it was only the “first” crucifixion that gave all of us life. Furthermore, “our suffering” has no “compension [compensation, comparison?]” with the “joy and glory of his [Christ’s] own presence.” Nevertheless, the raw and bloody force of the rough, upside-down imagery suggests more of a full connection with Finster’s latter-day persecution and the story of the atoning tragedy of Christ’s “first” crucifixion. The powerful imagery of the fractured cross with the tiny Abbie-like angel and the strangely garbed Finster with gushing ropes of blood draws attention to itself and sends a message that goes beyond his more cautious words. It is true that the allusion to the reverse crucifixion attributed to Jesus’s special disciple, Peter, was often said to indicate Peter’s meek refusal to let his death be compared with Jesus’s ignominious death. At the same time, however, there have always been suggestions that an upside-down crucifixion on an inverted cross is a subversive sign that overturns conventional understandings of Christ’s first and only salvific death on a cross.31 It is best to conclude that Finster would be mostly referring to his own humble, Saint Peter–like affirmation of the story of Christ’s act rather than fully identifying with, or completing, the first crucifixion. Finster’s story and imagery were not in this sense a new story and sign that compete with or replace the original Christian narrative. But they were for Finster a powerful continuation of the mythic power of that earlier story. Finster himself and his storied art

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figure 20. Howard Finster, They Used My Cross to Crucify, 1976–1977. Enamel paint on wood, 15.25 x 18.5 inches. Artwork no. 395. Ownership unknown. Photograph by Norinne Betjemann. Reproduced from Turner, Man of Visions, p. 83. © Finster Estate.

became a significant sign along the road of life stretching back to the time of Noah and Christ, while he also prophetically looked forward to his role in the Second Coming. Despite the potency of this one gruesome, sacrificial self-portrait, we do not fully know Howard Finster merely through the bold messianic sign of the fractured cross. Rather, we know him by all the stories, performances, words, images, signs, and constructions of his Holy Ghost power as an artist! These signs and artworks are what he also called the products and messages of his hidden man’s superhuman energy and “computerized brain.” Know him, then, by the stories of his life, his visionary evangelicalism, and his prolific “dimentional” art. By this standard, his suffering and sacrifice constituted a healing act for many who walked through his garden. Blessed be Saint Howard. We honor your beatific busyness. And we acknowledge your sacred strangeness! Blessed is your Garden, now devoid of your living spirit! For there are still signs! Signs that will show us the way to another Way! As so often

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occurs in such matters, Finster himself put it best: “I am Howard Finster a Stranger from Another World. [Others] have realy never figured me out for my kingdom is not of this world only my fathe[r] in heaven knows me on this planet and thats why I have been strong and happy, When my work is finished I will go back to other worlds.” It is time to let Howard Finster go home to other planets. My work is finished. I do not pretend to have figured out this Stranger from Another World. However I believe I have faithfully read many of the signs he left behind and found some of the many explicit and implicit messages communicated by means of his passionate craft. At the very end of my journey, and despite my inability to know the full mystery of Howard Finster, I can do no better than to join the maverick poet Jonathan Williams and the Duck Woman of Orpliss in wishing Howard the very best on whatever heavenly planet he may now inhabit. So I say in unison with Williams: “Howard, I don’t know the name of the planet you came from. But, when you go back, I sure hope it offers Classic Coke, red-eye gravy, and okra fried just right by the Duck Woman of Orpliss. You deserve the best!”32

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Notes

preface 1. For a cross-cultural overview of otherworldly explorers see I. P. Couliano, Out of This World: Otherworldly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein (Boston: Shambhala, 1991). 2. See Jonathan Gottschall’s superbly interesting and engagingly storied analysis of the meaning of stories, in The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). Also well worth reading for its plainspoken yet probing reflection on the power and pleasure of stories as a way of entering other worlds is C. S. Lewis’s “On Stories,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, edited with preface by Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966). 3. Michael Chabon, “Wes Anderson’s Worlds,” New York Review of Books, January 31, 2013, www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jan/31/wes-andersonworlds/. 4. See Jonathan Gottschall’s discussion of the “universal grammar” of a story, in The Storytelling Animal, pp. 51–56. 5. On the world-making of self-taught visionary artists see, for example, Roger Manley and Mark Sloan, Self-Made Worlds: Visionary Folk Art Environments (Denville, NJ: Aperture, 1997). 6. Chabon, “Wes Anderson’s Worlds.”

introduction All biblical quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible. 1. These expressions (“backwoods William Blake” and “Southern Andy Warhol”) are now commonly associated with Howard Finster. The “Andy

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Warhol” quote seems to go back to a comment made by Smithsonian curator Liza Kirwin and was quoted in an article by Cathy Trost, “This Fundamentalist Uses His Art and Garden to Spread the Word,” Wall Street Journal, July 2, 1986. The “William Blake” quote was circulating throughout the 1980s; one example is found in an essay by Susan Hankla, “Howard Finster Is in My Dreams,” in Sermons in Paint: A Howard Finster Folk Art Festival, ed. Ann F. Oppenhimer and Susan Hankla (Richmond, VA: University of Richmond, 1984), pp. 11–12. Another source is found in Candice Russell, “Artist’s Road to Salvation Paved with Paintings: In 1976, Howard Finster Had a Vision from God to Make Art; Now, That is How He Spreads the Gospel,” Sun Sentinel (South Florida), May 22, 1988, http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1988–05–22/ features/8801310686_1_finster-folk-art-paintings/2. The earliest and most insightful comparison of Finster and Blake that I know of is found in Jesse Murry’s 1982 catalog article for the Finster exhibition at the New Museum in New York. See “Finster’s Apocalypse,” in Currents: The Reverend Howard Finster (August 7–September 22, 1982), p. 4, http://archive.newmuseum.org/index. php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/6438. 2. See my Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). The paperback edition was published in 1988; most recently, a third edition has appeared: Myth and Meaning in Early Daoism (Magdalena, NM: Three Pines Press, 2008). 3. This sign from the porch is now in the collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia. The sign itself was one of Finster’s greatest hits and gave rise to several other versions, which appeared at various times in different locations throughout the Garden. 4. The repentant biblical “People of Nineveh” are mentioned in Jonah 3:5– 10. In the New Testament, Luke 11:32 alludes to Jonah and says, “The men of Nineve shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.” The implication is that Finster saw himself as the one “greater” than the prophet Jonas/Jonah. 5. Finster’s earlier house is now owned by the dealer David Leonardis, who calls it the Vision House. On the Vision House see www.howardfinstervisionhouse.com/2011-howard-finster-lecture-series/. It should be noted that, like most things Finster, there are conflicting stories about where the finger vision took place. Thomas Scanlin believes that the pivotal vision about “sacred art” took place in the Garden by the bicycle repair shed. 6. I must admit that I never actually witnessed Finster eating instant coffee directly out of a jar, but it was true that there were jars of instant coffee in the studio and he did constantly talk about needing coffee to stay awake. Both John F. Turner and Thomas Scanlin have reported to me on several occasions that they saw Finster eating a spoonful of instant coffee. However, it does seem that the “coffee-eating theme” became part of the mythmaking aspect of Finster’s persona and career—something that was self-constructed and encouraged by Finster, as well as aided and abetted by others, especially city-folk visitors who loved the “primitive” color of such legend cycles. It is also true, as Turner points out, that Finster’s consumption of caffeine helped him to maintain (using

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Finster’s words) “his staying power” while working. See Howard Finster: Man of Visions; The Life and Work of a Self-Taught Artist (New York: Knopf, 1989), pp. 207–211. 7. Thomas Scanlin tells me (personal communication, 2012) that Finster’s “tractor” enamel was the brand of paint called Fix-All Enamel. 8. Sometimes spelled Abby by Finster himself (and spelled that way by Turner in his Howard Finster: Man of Visions). Turner has shared with me a handwritten page from Finster’s story, “Howards Child Hood Days” (p. 7 of the manuscript), which starts with the spelling Abby and ends with Abbie. It is interesting that the famous painting of his first vision of the dead Abby/ie (“Howard Looks upon a Piece of Planet,” no. 2297, 1982; see chap. 5) does not refer to her by name. Abbie appears on her tombstone—see the photo in Tom Patterson, Howard Finster, Stranger from Another World (New York: Abbeville, 1989), p. 209. 9. On the shamanistic aspects of evangelical preaching see Amanda Porterfield’s “Shamanism: A Psychosocial Definition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55 (1987): 721–739; and Theophus H. Smith’s Conjuring Culture Biblical Formations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 159–162. 10. Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988). 11. See chapter 5 for a canonical version of this key visionary episode, which is recounted by Finster’s daughter, Thelma Finster Bradshaw, in her book Howard Finster: The Early Years; A Private Portrait of America’s Premier Folk Artist (Birmingham, AL: Crane Hill, 2001), pp. 123–125. 12. By “restored behavior” I am referring to the “performance studies” theories of Richard Schechner, who sees a direct connection between performance activities throughout cultural history and the myth-ritual aspects of religion as a cultural system. See, for example, his discussion “Performance and Ritual,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Lindsay Jones, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 2004). See also the discussion of the shamanistic mythos of theater/performance by David Cole in his The Theatrical Event (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975). 13. John F. Turner points out the connection between Finster’s early paintings and the tradition of evangelical chalk talks while preaching. He also reproduces an image of an early painting from Finster’s days in the 1940s and 1950s. See Howard Finster: Man of Visions, pp. 44–45. 14. For a re-creation of Finster’s born-again conversion, it is worth listening to the track titled “The Night Howard Got Saved,” on the recording The Night Howard Finster Got Saved (Global Village, 1997, compact disc). This is a theatrical performance wherein Finster not only acts out his own salvation with shouting and moaning but also contributes singing, music, crowd noises, and all manner of odd sound effects. The overall feeling is very much that you’ve entered a revival tent meeting and are witnessing a particularly dramatic descent of the Holy Ghost. Many of the other tracks on this album are choice examples of Finster’s theatrical and multimedia talents. For a graphic portrayal of Southern evangelical tradition see Eleanor Dickinson and Barbara Benziger, Revival (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

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15. Quoting Smith, Conjuring Culture, p. 161. Smith bases his views on the work of Porterfield and her psychosocial definition of shamanism. 16. See Ralph C. Wood’s Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004). 17. This is discussed in both Turner’s Howard Finster: Man of Visions and Patterson’s Howard Finster, Stranger. John F. Turner (email communication, August 13, 2013) says that Finster quit preaching because “people ‘could remember the color of his necktie, but not the subject of his sermon.’ ” 18. See Patterson’s introduction to his book Howard Finster, Stranger, and his article “Howard Finster’s First Picture Book,” Folk Art 29, no. 3 (Fall 2004). See also Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions on these same issues. 19. See the following: Carol Crown, “The End of the World with Reverend Howard Finster,” Oxford American 19 (December 1998): 38–39; her “A Continuing Revelation: Religious Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art,” Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion 24 (Winter 1999): 29–41; and her “One Bible, Two Preachers: Patchwork Sermons and Sacred Art in the American South,” in Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible, ed. Michael Lieb, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 340 ff. 20. On Finster and roadside signage and attractions, see also chapter 1 of this volume; and Glen Davies, “Stranger in Paradise: The Works of Reverend Howard Finster,” in Stranger in Paradise / The Works of Reverend Howard Finster (Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, 2009). On the often hidden “visual culture” of American Protestant tradition, see, among other works, David Morgan’s Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). See also Carol Crown’s “The Bible, Evangelical Christianity, and Southern Self-Taught Artists,” in her edited work Coming Home! SelfTaught Artists, the Bible and the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004); and Claudette Stager and Martha Carver, eds., Looking Beyond the Highway: Dixie Roads and Culture: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. I am especially indebted to Glen Davies regarding these subjects. 21. The best source for images of the Trion park/museum is Bradshaw’s Howard Finster: The Early Years, pp. 10–23. 22. This quotation and the tent-revival flyer are found in Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 32. 23. On religious/evangelical “conjuring” (particularly within Southern black tradition) see especially Smith’s Conjuring Culture, pp. 159–176. 24. On evangelical personal relationships with God, see T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back (New York: Knopf, 2012). 25. On R.E.M. see an insightful article by Matthew Sutton, “Little America: R.E.M., Howard Finster, and the Southern ‘Outsider Art’ Aesthetic,” Studies in Popular Culture 30 (Spring 2008): 1–20, http://pcasacas.org/SiPC/30.2/sutton .pdf. 26. The two most important exhibitions at Lehigh were in 1986 (The Finsters at Lehigh: The World’s Folk Art Church) and 2004 (Howard Finster [1916– 2001]: Revealing the Masterworks). Information on these exhibitions can be found on the Lehigh University Art Galleries website, www.luag.org/pages/home.

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cfm. On the 2004 exhibition see the article by Geoff Gehman, “Dizzying Visionary: Primitive Artist Howard Finster Created and Counseled to Stop Sinners from Speeding to Hell,” archived at www.luag.org/pages/viewfull.cfm?ElementID=131. See also Jerry Cullum, review of Howard Finster Retrospective Exhibition, Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, USA, October 2004, in Material Religion (March 2006): 140–142. A third group show was titled Natural Scriptures: Visions of Nature and the Bible in the Work of Hugo Sperger, Mini and Garland Adkins, Jessie and Ronald Cooper, and Howard Finster. See the catalog and monograph by the same title (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Art Galleries, 1990). 27. John F. Turner told me (email communication, c. 2012–13) that Finster had this building constructed so that “people in rolling chairs [wheel chairs] could get an overview of the Garden.” It eventually became, like the World’s Folk Art Church and other buildings, a repository for artwork done by Finster’s many fans and admirers. 28. John F. Turner, email communication, September 9, 2013. 29. See the article “Devil Worshippers Slain in their Backwoods Castle,” Florence (GA) Times-Tri-Cities Daily, December 18, 1982, http://news.google. com/newspapers?nid=1842&dat=19821218&id=UGkeAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7Mg EAAAAIBAJ&pg=3136,5267583. 30. On the Outsider Enclave Art Park see Gabrielle Salemo’s “It’s Magical, It’s Mystical, and It’s Lehigh’s Hidden Gem,” Lehigh Valley Morning Call, September 28, 2007, http://articles.mcall.com/2007–09–28/features/3779633_1_ arts-lehigh-art-works-outsider-artists. 31. Finster’s astute comments on his Carson show appearance are included in the video Howard Finster on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which was previously posted on YouTube. Unfortunately this video is no longer available on the Internet. The video includes significant segments of Finster’s appearance (the complete video of the show, too, has been removed from YouTube, but as of October 27, 2014, Howard Finster: Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show (2 Songs) is available: www.dailymotion.com/video/x7n09z_howard-finster-johnny-carson-s-toni_creation). Finster makes it clear on the show that he knew the importance of “not following the rules” and of just “cutting loose.” John F. Turner was the only person to accompany Finster to Burbank for the show, and in a private communication with me he indicated that Finster was fully aware of what he needed to do to be successful. The one spontaneous occurrence was the producer’s decision, with some prompting from Turner, to have Finster do a second segment of the show. 32. On the somatic, philosophical, and aesthetic (if not theological) implications of “scratching an itch,” see the spritely article “Scratching an Itch” by Sherri Irvin in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (66 [2008]: 25–35). Finster in many ways was truly insightful in his reflections about spontaneous/ intuitive knowing. 33. All the quotations in this and the next paragraph are from John F. Turner, email communication, October 2, 2012. 34. Ibid. 35. See Jack Lule, Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism (New York: Guilford Press, 2001).

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36. On these sociological aspects of the Finster mystique, see especially Gary Alan Fine, Everyday Genius, Self-Taught Art, and the Culture of Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). A pioneering work in this regard is Julia Ardery’s The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of TwentiethCentury Folk Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 37. See Patterson, Howard Finster, Stranger; and Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions. 38. See Robert Peacock with Annibel Jenkins, Paradise Garden: A Trip through Howard Finster’s Visionary World (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996); and Bradshaw, Howard Finster: The Early Years. 39. In the spring of 2008, I, along with two other Lehigh colleagues (Lloyd Steffen and Greg Reihman), taught a large interdisciplinary course, Tibet and Buddhism in Film and Myth (Religion/Philosophy/Asia 194) in preparation for the Dalai Lama’s visit to Lehigh. Concerning the mystique surrounding Tibet and the Dalai Lama see Donald Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

1. on the finster trail 1. See Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art (London: Studio Vista, 1972). Cardinal attributes the use of outsider art to his publisher. See Cardinal’s discussion of the term’s origins in his essay “Toward an Outsider Aesthetic,” in The Artist Outsider, ed. Michael D. Hall and Eugene W. Metcalf Jr. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), p. 39n2. It has also been said that the use of the term outsider art was intended to cash in on the ongoing popularity of a book by the maverick philosopher and novelist Colin Wilson, The Outsider (first published in 1956). 2. The enological context for the meaning of Dubuffet’s idea of brut as applied to art is entirely my own interpretive riff. Or perhaps I should say that it is my secondary fermentation of both Dubuffet and Cardinal. On méthode champenoise see, among other works, Gérard Liger-Belair’s Uncorked: The Science of Champagne (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 3. On Dubuffet and art brut see Laurent Danchin, Jean Dubuffet (Paris: Terrail, 2001); Lucienne Peiry, Art Brut: The Origins of Outsider Art (Paris: Flammarion, 2001); and Michel Thevoz, Art Brut (Geneva: Booking International, 1995). 4. On the surrealist influence on Dubuffet and art brut see Colin Rhodes, Outsider Art Spontaneous Alternatives (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), pp. 82–85. 5. The most famous of these early psychiatric studies of the “art of the insane” were Hans Prinzhorn, Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922, in German; reprint in translation, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995); and Walter Morgenthaler, Ein Geisteskranken als Kunstler (Bern: Bircher, 1921). For an important overview of these issues see John M. MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Prinzhorn, it can be noted, did not believe that the art was diagnostic of insanity, but that it showed certain common principles of visual configuration and ordering.

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6. In relation to anthropology, see Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive A Critique of Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1974); and in relation to art history, see Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994). 7. On the so-called degenerate art (Entartete Kunst) see Stephanie Barron, ed., Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991). 8. With regard to the distinction between “folk” and “contemporary folk art” see the helpful discussion by Charles Russell in his essay “Finding a Place for the Self-Taught in the Arts World(s),” in Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art, ed. Russell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp. 3–34. 9. Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum (in the spirit of its founder and director, Rebecca Hoffberger) has been the champion of a broadly defined understanding of visionary art: “Visionary art as defined for the purposes of the American Visionary Art Museum refers to art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself.” See the museum’s website: www.avam.org/stuff-everyone-asks/what-is-visionary-art.shtml. 10. On Peter F. Paul’s career and conviction for conspiracy and drug dealing see, among other articles, April Witt, “House of Cards: What Do Cher, a Hollywood Con Man, a Political Rising Star and an Audacious Felon Have in Common?” Washington Post, October 9, 2005. As John F. Turner says, Finster came to realize that he was taken advantage of by Paul (email communication, August 31, 2013). 11. Tom Patterson argues for a 1915 date based on suppositions about how old Finster was when he had the vision of Abbie at around the time of her death (April 5, 1919). In an email communication Patterson said: [D]o the math: If Howard was born in December of 1916, as is often written, he would have been about two and a half years old [at the time of the Abbie vision]. And he was wandering around the farm by himself, walking in the house to ask about his mother before going back outside and across the road to find her—all by himself? At two and a half years old? On the other hand, if the birth was in 1915, he would have been three and a half years old. Still very young to be out on your own in the tall weeds, but children roamed free in those days, so it’s easily imaginable. More plausible than at two and a half, I say.

12. Admittedly, many of these shows were at various wannabe galleries jumping onto the outsider bandwagon, but amid the roughage there were diamonds like the Venice Biennale, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Smithsonian, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Museum of American Folk Art, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. 13. In November 2013 one of Finster’s four-by-four-foot paintings (Vision of Mary’s Angel) sold for almost $53,000. See Randall Lott and Tina Cox, “Finster Breaks Record,” Folk Art Messenger 24 (Fall–Winter 2013): 34–35. See my plate 11.

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14. I borrow the phrase “well-known stranger” from the title to a film by Elizabeth Fine and Hazen Robert Walker. See Well Known Stranger: Howard Finster’s Workout (Cima Productions, 1987), 28 min., at Folkstreams, www. folkstreams.net/film/207. 15. Tommye Scanlin grew up as a Southern Baptist and, along with her husband, Thomas Scanlin, was a friend of Finster. She vividly describes the action in this photograph in the following way (private communication c. 2012): The preacher (Finster in this case) would say a few words to the effect of “I baptize sister [name], in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost!” And then he’d put the hand that’s raised in the air, behind the person’s head, hold the other hand on top of the clasped hands of the person, and swiftly dunk the person backward and under the water. The preacher would then lift the person up—hence the streaming hair of those who’ve already been baptized.

16. The location is identified as “Lookout Mountain” (“a favorite destination” for the Finsters) in Thelma Finster Bradshaw’s Howard Finster: The Early Years: A Private Portrait of America’s Premier Folk Artist (Birmingham, AL: Crane Hill, 2001), p. 43. It is clearly the same picture, but it has been cropped and does not show the torn, handwritten inscription (most likely) by Pauline on the photo. 17. The quotes are from various thought cards, c. 1970s—one card is labeled “Comics by Howard”—in the Howard Finster Collection, in the Jeffrey and Jane Camp Papers, 1969–c. 1990, reels 4057–4070, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. “Thought cards,” for Finster, were all sorts of things he had handy to write on (three-by-five-inch cards, scraps of paper, the backs of printed matter, etc.). He used them to record his random thoughts and visions and often included little drawings or cartoons/comics to illustrate a point. 18. These trades included farming, taxidermy, mind reading, woodcrafting, textile work, dye house operation, bicycle and TV repair, logging, grocery store operation, preaching, and so on (John F. Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions; The Life and Work of a Self-Taught Artist [New York: Knopf, 1989], p. 51). 19. On the complexities of the Christian evangelical idea and experience of being born again, see especially Eleanor Dickinson and Barbara Benziger’s Revival (New York: Harper and Row, 1974; Dickinson interviewed Finster on several occasions); and Deborah McCauley’s Appalachian Mountain Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 20. This is perhaps the most-quoted Finsterian refrain and is found in many different publications. The version I refer to here is from Tom Patterson’s introduction to his Howard Finster, Stranger from Another World (New York: Abbeville, 1989), p. 23. Because of its popularity, Finster produced several other versions of this sign. 21. Quotation found on a thought card, Thomas E. Scanlin Collection, © Thomas E. Scanlin. 22. Original document is in the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection, © Thomas E. Scanlin. 23. Both of these are found in the Scanlin Collection, © Thomas E. Scanlin. The first of these reads:

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I show my love [care] by the work of my hand, To[o] leave a trace of god Upon this land.

The second says: When God took me from the garbage of the land [can] Then he touched my heart. And he cleansed my hands He blessed my work, with wood, and stones. Since that time i am never alone

24. On the formative significance of the King James Version of the Bible see Alister McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 2001); Leland Ryken, The Legacy of the King James Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011); and Robert Alter, Pen of Iron American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 25. It should be noted that the line breaks here were determined by the size of the paper Finster was writing on. Thought card, Thomas E. Scanlin Collection, © Thomas E. Scanlin. 26. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), pp. 16–20. It is noteworthy that Lévi-Strauss links the mythic nature of the odd-job man’s method of finding meaning in matter with “socalled ‘raw’ or ‘naïve’ art” (p. 17). 27. This is taken from one of Finster’s notes, titled “Gods Trees” and dated “February 22, 1970 at 12:00 O’Clock.” The original document is in the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection, © Thomas E. Scanlin. 28. See Carol Crown, “More Than Meets the Eye: Visions of the Sacred in Southern Self-Taught Art,” in Sacred and Profane, ed. Carol Crown and Charles Russell (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007), pp. 40–65. 29. The importance of the tradition of church slogans for front-lawn bulletin boards is seen in such works as L. James Harvey’s 701 Sentence Sermons: Attention-Getting Quotes for Church Signs, Bulletins, Newsletters, and Sermons (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2000); and Verlyn Verbrugge’s Your Church Sign: 1001 Attention-Getting Sayings (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing, 1999). See the discussion of these signage traditions in Joe York’s With Signs Following (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). 30. See especially the discussion of this by Charles Reagan Wilson in his introduction to York’s With Signs Following, pp. v–viii. See also the related discussion about Finster’s passion for roadside signage and attractions in Glen Davies’s “Paradise on Earth,” in Stranger in Paradise: The Works of Reverend Howard Finster (Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, 2009), pp. 11–22. On religious roadside attractions, and for an insightful discussion of Finster and his Paradise Garden, see Timothy K. Beal’s Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005). 31. For an interesting background article with pictures about Mayes, see “Henry Harrison Mayes, 1898–1986,” SmithDRay website, September 18,

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2000, http://smithdray.tripod.com/hmayes-index-7–1.html. John F. Turner has indicated in several email communications (such as on January 23, 2013, and August 31, 2013) that he remembers Finster being impressed with Mayes and his sign ministry: “Brother Mayes was [Finster’s] inspiration.” 32. An image of Howard’s Last Painting (no. 46991, paint on wood, 2001) is found in Davies’s Stranger in Paradise, p. 101. This work is in the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection. 33. This handwritten document (“A Peep at His Power”) is found in the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection. It was intended as a poem to be published in the Trion Facts and Summerville News, and Finster includes some instructions for the typesetter: “Please line up the rhyming words if possible [even] if it cost a little more.” 34. The “super brain” reference is found on one of Finster’s thought cards, where he is working out what to put on one of his cutout carvings of a “Cheata.” This is dated March 23, 1984. “Morning star so bright” is found on another thought-card record of a poem or song (“If I could only be a sign”) dated August 13, 1967. Both documents are from the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection, © Thomas E. Scanlin. 35. See the discussion of these vacations in Bradshaw’s Howard Finster: The Early Years, pp. 110–21. His elaborate sand castles, or “sand museum,” as a Florida newspaper noted, drew a big “crowd at gulf beach.” 36. I am referring to a text by Davies, Stranger in Paradise, pp. 11–12. 37. Original thought card held in the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection, © Thomas E. Scanlin. The complete text is as follows: “Oh clock of time you count my hours away in my second adam theres nothing you can say. Your little hands are to feeble your tick tock is not my call. In my Fathers mansion theres no clocks on the wall / You wear your parts down thin counting time to an end / But for me I’ve hardly begin / Oh clock of time who chimes.” These themes about time are visually displayed in an important cutout painting done in 1980 called Time Waits for Nothing (no. 1806, enamel on wood, 23 × 82.5 inches), which is now in the Scanlin Collection. See an image of this painting in Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 8. 38. Both thought cards are found in the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection, © Thomas E. Scanlin. 39. Both quotes, as well as the reference to lizards and snakes, in this paragraph are found in Norman Girardot and Ricardo Viera’s interview “Howard Finster,” Art Journal 53 (1994): 48–50. 40. Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 147. 41. See the interesting graphic depiction of this in “Mr. Blake’s Company” by Joel Priddy in ImageText 3, no. 1 (Winter 2007), www.english.ufl.edu/ imagetext/archives/v3_2/priddy/. 42. See John F. Turner’s “When Allen Ginsberg Met Howard Finster,” Raw Vision, no. 67 (Fall–Winter 2009). Ginsberg is quoted as noting that “Howard is able to communicate the energy of living in the world with an unobstructed imagination. Certainly the exuberant beauty of his work is moving, like Blake’s, who says, ‘Exuberance is beauty.’ ” 43. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793). The text can be accessed at the William Blake Archive: www.blakearchive.org/blake/site.info.html.

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44. The nature of visionary/religious experience as related to psychotic states of mind is an issue greatly influenced by the disciplinary persuasion of the researcher. Within the context of the academic study of religion, the classic study is William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the topic, although there is still no compelling consensus on the distinctive nature of “visionary” experience in relation to other extraordinary states of consciousness. A recent discussion that brings together cognitive and humanistic perspectives is Ann Taves’s Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). See also Ivan Leudar and Philip Thomas, Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity: Studies of Verbal Hallucinations (London: Routledge, 2000). Finally, a well-balanced and insightful recent study is T. M. Luhrman’s When God Talks Back (New York: Knopf, 2012). 45. Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995; reprint, New York: Twelve, 2012), p. 16. The Latin phrase, a medieval scholastic aphorism, translates as: “The people want to be deceived, and so they will be.” 46. See, for example, an article by Mattathias Schwartz, “Amazing or Shit,” London Review 33, no. 24 (December 15, 2011): 26–27. 47. See the interesting discussion of this point in Sue Halpern, “Who Was Steve Jobs?” New York Review of Books, January 12, 2012, p. 26. 48. On creativity as “tinkering” see Malcolm Gladwell’s essay on Jobs, “The Tweaker,” New Yorker (November 14, 2011), www.newyorker.com/reporting /2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell. 49. See, for example, Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), and, written in a semiapologetic mode, Thomas Craughwell’s Saints Behaving Badly: The Cutthroats, Crooks, Trollops, Con Men, and Devil Worshippers Who Became Saints (New York: Doubleday, 2006).

2. signs of the times 1. For the “classic” designation of certain outsiders see the Raw Vision Outsider Art Sourcebook (Radlett, U.K.: Raw Vision, 2002), p. 57. In a later edition of the Sourcebook (2009), the label “classic outsiders” was dropped in favor of the more generic “outside and visionary artists.” 2. See, for example, a review of a recent Finster exhibition: Margaret Hawkins, “Finster, Sullivan Exhibits a Marvelous Treat for Chicago,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 3, 2010. Fears that the hypersentimental tchotchke/ Hello Kitty aspects of folk and outsider art were becoming increasingly prevalent were discussed around this time by an Internet discussion group moderated by the scholar and gallerist Randall Morris. 3. Some probing, in-depth analysis of the artistic, cultural, and religious significance of Thomas Kinkade is found in Alexis L. Boylan, ed., Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Kinkade describes himself as a “devout Christian” and said that he gains his artistic

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inspiration from his religious beliefs. Most of all, his work was intended to communicate a religious and moral “message.” I am indebted to John F. Turner for suggesting the comparison with Kinkade (email communication, c. 2012). 4. See Adam Gopnik, “Joseph Cornell and the Art of Nostalgia,” New Yorker, February 17, 2003, www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/02/17/030217crat_atlarge ?printable=true¤tPage=all#ixzz1bKfA5JVZ. On Cornell see, among other works, Deborah Solomon, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (New York: Noonday Press, 1997); and especially Lindsay Blair, Joseph Cornell’s Vision of Spiritual Order (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). 5. Examples of what I call Finster’s cosmic structure paintings are Howard Looks Upon a Piece of Planet (no. 2297, see plate 6), discussed in chapter 5, some of his Faith Goes In works (for example, no. 2291, see plate 13) discussed in chapter 7, and Jacob’s Ladder (no. 2281), which was sold at the Slotin Auction in Buford, Georgia (April 26–27, 2014). 6. Regarding the “identity politics” and the search for a kind of “identity art” authenticity associated with the Finster phenomenon, see the work of the sociologist Gary Alan Fine, Everyday Genius, Self-Taught Art, and the Culture of Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 7. On strangeness as an interpretive category see my “My Eliade: Personal Reflections on the Splendor of the Strange, the Sacred, and the Sublime,” Archaevs 14 (2010): 11–26. 8. See Ellen Dissanayake on “making special” or “making the ordinary extraordinary” in her “Very Like Art: Self-Taught Art from an Ethological Perspective,” in Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art, ed. Charles Russell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp. 35–46. 9. The “banality of the sacred,” or the revelation of the sacred/spirit in the utterly profane/banal/ mundane/material, is a theme emphasized in the work of the scholar of comparative religion Mircea Eliade. For a discussion of this issue see Bryan Rennie’s “Mircea Eliade and the Perception of the Sacred in the Profane: Intention, Reduction, and Cognitive Theory,” Temenos 43, no. 1 (2007), www.naasr.com/RennieTemenos43.pdf. 10. See Roberta Smith, “Howard Finster, Folk Artist and Preacher, Dies at 84,” New York Times, October 23, 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/10/23/arts/ howard-finster-folk-artist-and-preacher-dies-at-84.html?ref=robertasmith; and her “Outsiders Who Specialized in Talking Pictures,” New York Times, November 19, 1989, which compares Finster and Basquiat. The latter is online at www.nytimes.com/1989/11/19/arts/art-view-outsiders-who-specialized-in-talking-pictures.html?ref=robertasmith. And see Donald Kuspit, “The Appropriation of Marginal Art in the 1980s,” American Art 5 (1991): 133–141. Kuspit comments that the fascination with Finster is related to the lust for novelty and authenticity as related to the postmodern idea of marginality. He goes on to note that “the taste for self-taught marginal art has to do with the implicit belief that it returns us to the level of inchoate, inarticulate, emotionally archaic experience. . . . It returns us to a kind of prehistorical awareness, reinstating with special purity what has been called the child’s vision of the world” (p. 138).

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11. See Sally Promey, “The ‘Return’ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 581–603. See also Holland Cotter, “Making Secular Art Out of Religious Imagery,” New York Times, October 29, 2008. 12. For context on this issue in relation to the classic Weberian thesis about disenchantment, see Richard Jenkins’s “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Reenchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium,” in Max Weber Studies 1 (2000): 11–32, www.maxweberstudies.org/kcfinder/upload/files/MWSJournal/1.1pdfs /1.1%2011–32.pdf. See also an earlier, controversial study by Suzi Gablik, The Re-enchantment of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992). 13. See, for example, James Elkins and David Morgan, eds., Re-enchantment (New York: Routledge, 2009). See my comments (“An Inquisition into the ‘Art Seminar’ on Art and Religion”) on pp. 200–208. Also helpful is Jeffrey Kosky’s Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 14. See Tom Patterson’s “Paradise before and after the Fall,” Raw Vision 35 (Summer 2001): 42–51; and Carol Crown, “Paradise Revisited: The Desecration and Reclamation of Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden,” Number 39 (Summer 2001): 28–33. 15. The quotation is from Jack Hitt’s interview with Finster in “The Selling of Howard Finster,” Southern Magazine, November 1987, 91. 16. See John F. Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions: The Life and Work of a Self-Taught Artist (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 219 (image of Visions of Planets Beyond the Light of the Sun, 1978). The quoted words are found on the painting in the upper right-hand corner. Turner drew my attention to these words in an email communication, September 2, 2013). Finster’s sympathy for similitudes was noticed by James Smith Pierce in his essay “Teaching by Simulations of Folk Art,” in Sermons in Paint: A Howard Finster Folk Art Festival, ed. Ann F. Oppenhimer and Susan Hankla (Richmond, VA: University of Richmond, 1984), pp. 11–14. As Pierce says, Finster’s idea of similitude was an example of the anagogical or mystical form of biblical interpretation in which everything is potentially a sign with a hidden meaning.

3. the matter of my mission 1. See the video of the Blues Brothers’ performances and the classic “mission from God” phrase on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrxSM_Gxtqw& feature=related. 2. See, for example, the review by Stephen Holden, “The Troubled Homecoming of a Southern Golden Boy,” New York Times, August 3, 2005, http:// movies.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/movies/03june.html. 3. On the incongruities of a Jesus-soaked South, see the 2007 British-made film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, about music, religion, and the dark sadness and joy of the American South. See the listing for that film on the Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com/title/tt0389361/. 4. This observation comes from John F. Turner, email communication, May 17, 2013.

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5. I met Lemming several times when I was in the Summerville area in the mid-1980s, and personally witnessed his morning ritual of electric stimulation. 6. For a positive analysis of the religious, ethical, and social values of the southern Appalachian tradition, see especially Deborah McCauley’s Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); and Loyal Jones’s Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999). More generally on Southern religious tradition, see Charles Reagan Wilson’s Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); David Harrell, Varieties of Southern Evangelicalism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1981); and Richard Kind, “Eleanor Dickinson: Religion and the Southern Artist,” Women’s Art Journal (Spring–Summer 1982): 1–5. Another important resource on these issues is the large collection of articles in Samuel S. Hill, Charles H. Lippy, and Charles Reagan, eds., Encyclopedia of Religion in the South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005). 7. The Hooded Utilitarian; “Outside Crumb,” blog entry by Caro (a.k.a. Caroline Small), August 6, 2010, http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2010/08/outside-crumb/#commentspost. 8. Ibid. 9. On these folkloric traditions in America see Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). See also Trudier Harris, “The Trickster in African American Literature,” Freedom’s Story, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center, n.d., http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/ freedom/1865–1917/essays/trickster.htm. On the trope of trickster figures—as related to their “signifying” trickery and “resistance” in the face of mainstream culture—among African slaves in America and their African American progeny, see Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). The trickster monkey in Gates’s title refers to Esu Elegbara in Yoruba tradition. See also Jason R. Young’s Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). 10. This Finster quotation comes from John F. Turner, personal communication, c. 2013. 11. See, for example, Jack Hitt, “The Selling of Howard Finster,” Southern Magazine (November 1987): 52–55. 12. Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978–1990, ed. MaLin Wilson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 147. 13. Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, 2010), pp. 110–111. 14. For all the Terry Castle quotes in this discussion, see her article “Do I Like It?” London Review of Books 33 (July 28, 2011): 19–23. 15. Castle does make an exception for certain of the canonical outsiders like Wölfli, Rizzoli, Ramírez, and (of course) Darger—see ibid., pp. 20–21. 16. Ryan quoted in ibid., pp. 21–23.

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17. See, among other works, Bottoms’s Spiritual American Trash: Portraits from the Margins of Art and Faith (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2013); and The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). The Colorful Apocalypse deals extensively and sympathetically with Finster. All the quotations in this and the next paragraph are from The Colorful Apocalypse, pp. 12, 25, 33, 52–54. 18. Concerning David and Susan Fetcho’s Finster film, see Dan Goldston’s “Steven Pattie—Howard Finster’s Art and the Film I Can Feel Another Planet in My Soul,” Examiner.com, August 28, 2010, www.examiner.com/article/stevenpattie-howard-finster-s-art-and-the-film-i-can-feel-another-planet-my-soul. 19. Allen Ginsberg’s wary assessment of Finster is recounted in John F. Turner’s “When Allen Ginsberg Met Howard Finster,” Raw Vision 67 (Fall–Autumn 2009): 42–45. Turner notes Ginsberg’s summary opinion of Finster: “There is always this little question of Finster, ‘Is he nuts?’ ‘Is he another neurotic genius, or is he a supreme visionary?’ I would have to say that he is a supreme neurotic genius, which isn’t so bad.” 20. On shamans and their ambiguous relationship with trickster mythology see M. L. Rickett’s “The Shaman and the Trickster,” in Mythical Trickster Figures, ed. William Hynes and William Doty (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), pp. 87–105. On trickster figures and the artistic creativity of “supreme mystics and neurotic visionaries,” see especially the fascinating literary and anthropological meditation by Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World (New York: North Point Press, 1998). 21. See Jose Enrique Tavel’s monograph on Finster’s Garden and structuralist theory, “A Theory of Architecture” (master’s thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1987). 22. I borrow this image of the tiered wedding cake from the catalog Sermons in Paint: A Howard Finster Folk Art Festival (Richmond, VA: University of Richmond, 1984), edited by Ann Oppenhimer and Susan Hankla. It is worth noting that throughout his career Finster either constructed (e.g., in Trion, Georgia) or painted buildings as multitiered mansions, often heavenly mansions. In the 1950s George Adamski was one of the most famous of the “contactees” who claimed to have met with saucer people, and who was charged in a religious way with a prophetic mission to warn the earth of some impending disaster. See Adamski’s book Inside the Spaceships (1955) and the “official” George Adamski website: www.adamskifoundation.com/. Whether Finster had ever heard of Adamski or other contactees is not clear, but it is certainly true that he frequently talked about flying saucers (see chapter 5). It is entirely possible that Finster had heard of, or seen (most likely on TV), something about the contactees or the popular films The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). 23. For a history-of-religions perspective see Catherine Albanese’s discussion “Regional Religion: A Case Study of Tradition in Southern Appalachia” in her America: Religions and Religion (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1981), pp. 221–43. See also the insightful comments of Paul Evans in his review of Howard Finster: Stranger from Another World by Tom Patterson, Art Papers 13, no. 5 (1989): 84. As Evans notes, “Too long and often a force for oppression, banality and

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mean spiritedness, fundamentalism gets redeemed by Finster, who draws from it some of its original, releasing joy.” 24. On the complexities of highland Southern Baptist denominational traditions, see especially Jones’s Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands. Although it seems reasonable to say that Finster is best thought of as a Free Will Baptist, this was a fluid category; and depending on when you listened to Finster, there were other options, such as Primitive and Missionary Baptists. But Finster emphasized repeatedly that he was too “independent” for labels. See, for example, Naman Crowe, “The Visionary and His Work,” Summerville News, August 29, 1996. See also Mary Lynch, “Howard Finster: An Examination of the Use of Evangelical Practices by a Self-Taught Visionary Artist” (master’s thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1995). 25. Liza Kirwin, “Oral History Interview with Howard Finster, 1984 June 11,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-howard-finster-12492. 26. For a knowledgeable discussion of Finster’s apocalypticism see Carol Crown, “More Than Meets the Eye: Visions of the Sacred in Southern SelfTaught Art,” in Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), pp. 40–65. 27. On the impact of Warner Sallman’s image of Jesus, see especially David Morgan, ed., Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 28. Both John F. Turner of Berkeley and Finster’s hometown friend John C. Turner have told me in conversation that they heard Finster speak in tongues. However this was a rare occurrence and seemed to be more of a performanceon-demand than a spontaneous manifestation of a charismatic gift. I never witnessed any kind of Finster glossolalia. 29. See Crown’s “More than Meets the Eye”; and Harriet A. Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), which distinguishes between Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism. 30. I am aware of two or three other versions of the secret script, which exist in the Scanlin Collection and the John Denton Collection. John F. Turner tells me (email communication, June 9, 2013) that Finster did a small painting called something like “Raining the Unknown Language,” which now seems to be lost. There is also an early painting, titled Emblems of the Times (apparently no. 1146, signed only “by Howard”; see the reproduction in Howard Finster: Man of Visions; The Life and Work of a Self-Taught Artist [New York: Knopf, 1989], p. 221), that depicts a many-branched tree upon which are hanging many strange figurative and abstract symbols (emblems or “similitudes”). This work alludes to both Isaiah 28:21 (referring to “strange works” and “strange acts”) and Hosea 12:10 (“I [God] have also spoken by the prophets, and I have multiplied visions, and used similitudes, by the ministry of the prophets”). The lower inscription on this work says that the emblems have “unknown meanings” that will be known only at the “end of time.” On one occasion at his house in Summerville, Finster showed me a painting that had a band of the secret writing. He did not explain what it meant. The possible influence of Masonic secret initiatory scripts was suggested to me when, upon one of my frequent visits to Paradise Garden, I happened across a

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Masonic handbook at a flea market just down the road from the Garden in Pennville. On Masonic tradition symbols and scripts see W. Kirk MacNulty, Freemasonry: Symbols, Secrets, Significance (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006). 31. See William Samarin, Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (New York: Macmillan, 1972). 32. One source for this famous quotation is a thought card from 1979: “I am my own T.V. set my mind is picking up pictures of visions right out of thin air even waves of vision patterns from on high far beyond the wave line of your T.V. sets.” For another version, see the epigraphs to this chapter. Both versions are from thought cards in the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection, © Thomas E. Scanlin. 33. On Flannery O’Conner, see George Niederauer’s “Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Vision,” America 197 (December 24, 2007), http://americamagazine. org/issue/639/article/flannery-oconnors-religious-vision. William Faulkner’s religiosity is discussed in Faulkner and Religion, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2006). On Flannery O’Conner’s religious vision as it relates to Finster see also the introduction. 34. Everything That Rises Must Converge was the title of one of Flannery O’Conner’s collections of short stories (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965), written when she was ill with lupus. The phrase “Everything that rises must converge” refers to a principle by the French philosopher and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the “Omega Point”: “Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.” See the essay “Omega Point” in Teilhard de Chardin’s The Future of Man (New York: HarperCollins, 1964); this was the first English edition; first published in 1959, in French. 35. Interview by Jean Stein, “William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12,” in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. Malcolm Cowley, 1st series (New York: Viking, 1958); the interview as it appeared in the Paris Review (no. 12 [Spring 1956]) is available at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4954/the-art-of-fiction-no-12-william-faulkner. 36. Finster’s reference to the “emage,” or image of things, is found on many of his paintings, such as the Emage of Elvis and Emage of Hank Williams. The Emage of Elvis at Three Years Old (no. 2021, 1981) is in the Arient Family Collection and is reproduced in Glen Davies’s “Stranger in Paradise: The Works of Reverend Howard Finster,” in Stranger in Paradise: The Works of Reverend Howard Finster (Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, 2009), p. 89. 37. Finster’s Free Will Baptist faith is largely expressive of what is called Wesleyan Arminianism, which affirms the danger of “backsliding.” See Steven Harper, Wesleyan Arminianism: Four Views on Eternal Security (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002). 38. On the Orthodox tradition of icons, see, among many other works, Vladimir Lossky and Leonid Ouspensky, The Meaning of Icons (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999). 39. This painting is in the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection. It was painted before Finster started to date his work. It is numbered 327, which dates it to approximately 1977.

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40. As John F. Turner has noted, Finster always felt that he could “draw just about anybody.” See Howard Finster: Man of Visions, pp. 124–125. 41. These paper, cardboard, and plywood patterns were either drawn directly or traced from miscellaneous found sources. Finster “preferred to call such stencils of his visionary images ‘dementions.’ He felt that once they had been realized in vision it did not matter who traced and painted them—they would always be ‘sacred art’ (i.e., anyone could be the artist) and he invited people to borrow his and paint their own variations. He also encouraged people to realize their own ‘sacred art dementions’ ”—quoted from Ray Kass website, www.raykass.com/html/finster.html. 42. See the helpful overview of “pareidolia” in Kim Ann Zimmermann’s “Pareidolia: Seeing Faces in Unusual Places,” Livescience, December 11, 2012, www.livescience.com/25448-pareidolia.html. The religious implications of this are explored by the anthropologist Stewart Elliott Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Like the evangelical propensity to see God everywhere, Finster saw animate faces, and art, in everything. As he said, “Everything I see is art. I have visions of things before I do them. I can look at people’s art that is done and all kinds of shapes and things are there and I find art in it. I can find art in art that is already done. I can look out through the woods and see faces and things that form on the leaves. I find all shapes of art in rocks” (quoted in Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 153). 43. On chaos theory see James Gleick, Chaos: The Making of a New Science (New York: Penguin, 1987). 44. On Dubuffet’s passion for the emergent face or “archetype” seen in all sorts of random matter, see Laurent Danchin’s Jean Dubuffet (Paris: Terrail, 2001), especially pp. 99–111. The quotation is from p. 85. 45. On the x-ray art among shamanistic traditions see Andreas Lommel, Shamanism: The Beginnings of Art (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967). 46. Among many works, see Wilson’s Judgment and Grace in Dixie and the haunting work on snake handling by Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1995). Worth viewing, among other films, is Robert Duvall’s The Apostle (1997). It has been said (by David Fetcho in conversation) that Duvall’s portrayal of the preacher in The Apostle was influenced by his viewing of Finster’s behavior on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. 47. Finster’s visionary religiosity in many ways exemplifies Catherine Albanese’s revisionist view of American religious history, a history that was much more expansively eccentric, diverse, visionary, and spiritual/“metaphysical” than it was rigidly doctrinaire, denominational, or sectarian. See her A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).

4. the first and second noah 1. For all of Finster’s ardent self-identification with the biblical story of Noah as seen in his numerous thought cards, sermonic harangues, and Bible-verse

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signs in Paradise Garden (as well as the structure called “Noah’s Barnyard” in the Garden), it appears that, unlike so many other folk artists, he painted very few traditional or visionary depictions of Noah and his ark. 2. Quoted in Karekin Geokjian and Robert Peacock‘s Light of the Spirit: Portraits of Southern Outsider Artists (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998). 3. On the ambiguous meaning of gopher wood see the traditional evangelical Christian discussion “What Is “Gopher Wood’?” n.d., ChristianAnswers.net, http://christiananswers.net/q-eden/gopherwood.html. For a more scholarly discussion of the Noah story and related issues, see Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, ed., The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (n.p.: Abingdon Press, 2006). 4. See Mike Brennan, “Art of Darkness: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster in Contemporary Art,” ModernEdition.com, n.d., www.modernedition.com/artarticles/apocalyptic-art/apocalypse-in-art.html#to. 5. I do not, therefore, mean TV’s modern MythBusters-style vernacular or popular understanding of myth, as obviously false rumors, blatantly superstitious and superciliously teasing “tall tales,” or ubiquitous and vaguely absurd urban legends. Nor am I referring to the folkloric sayings, chestnuts of proverbial wisdom, or smarmy politically correct platitudes that one may see dismantled on television’s Penn and Teller: Bullshit! program. 6. On the mythic/artistic/emotional truth communicated by a “believing is seeing” approach to knowing, see Errol Morris, Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (New York: Penguin Books, 2014); Mary Anne Staniszewski, Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art (New York: Penguin Books, 1995). 7. On some of these issues concerning narrative theory see the site called Narratology/Narremes, www.narratology.info/narratology/. The slogan for this site is: “Because our stories help make sense of our lives.” 8. See Wendy Doniger’s balanced discussion of some of these issues in her Implied Spider Politics and Theology in Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 9. See Jonathan Gottschall’s discussion of the universal grammar of a story in his Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), pp. 51–56. 10. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: William Morrow, 1993). 11. On these issues of the natural and the paranormal as related to the study of religion see the provocative discussion by Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Kripal specifically avoids “supernatural” terminology in favor of the “paranormal” (i.e., beyond our current scientific understanding). 12. On the Elvis cult as a collective art form with religious cult implications see especially Greil Marcus, Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (New York: Doubleday, 1991); and John Strausbaugh, E: Reflections on the Birth of the Elvis Faith (New York: Blast Books, 1995). The visionary connection between Elvis and Finster is discussed in my chapter 5. 13. See Jeffrey Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

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14. Karen Armstrong, Short History of Myth (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006), p. 10 and 134 ff. 15. See especially Jonathan Garb, Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Pieter F. Craffert, The Life of a Galilean Shaman: Jesus of Nazareth in Anthropological-Historical Perspective (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008). 16. This image was called by Beverly Finster the “peace bird” and recalls an image in Picasso’s lithograph La Colombe (The dove). It seems that Picasso’s image actually continued the tradition of the dove mentioned in the Noah story. 17. Thought card in the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection, © Thomas E. Scanlin. 18. See particularly Alan Dundes, ed., The Flood Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and David Leeming’s article “Flood,” in The Oxford Companion to World Mythology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 19. The Garden quote is from an article by Margaret Browne, “Paradise Regained,” Folk Art Messenger 22 (Summer 2010), www.folkart.org/mag /paradise-regained. 20. See, for example, Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010) and David Whitley’s Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief (New York: Prometheus, 2009). See also Alexander Marshack’s classic work on the time-factored myth-ritual nature of cave art, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginning of Man’s First Art, Symbol and Notation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972). 21. The connection with shamanism is persuasively argued in David Lewis Williams’s The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002); and in Jean Clottes and David LewisWilliams’s The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves (New York: Abrams, 1998). More generally on the paradigmatic significance of shamanism for evolutionary development, see Michael Winkelman, Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010). Much of the discussion about shamanism as a kind of primal religious pattern goes back to Mircea Eliade’s pioneering work, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (New York: Pantheon, 1964). This work was originally published in French in 1951. 22. On the significance of rainbows see Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). It is worth remarking that Fisher links the rare experience of wonderment with our aesthetic experience of art. Other discussions of the relation of the emotion of wonder/amazement to both art and religion are Robert C. Fuller, Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Julian Spalding, The Art of Wonder: A History of Seeing (Munich: Prestel, 2005). 23. Marshack’s Roots of Civilization and David Lewis Williams’s Mind in the Cave are especially important for interpreting the symbolic/myth-ritual and shamanistic messages communicated by Paleolithic art. See also D. Bruce Dickson’s judicious overview in his Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Paleolithic of Southwestern Europe (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990).

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24. So also are there aural/linguistic/musical and behavioral/performative/ ritual forms of symbolic action going back to the Paleolithic era. One striking example of this is the evidence of a musical instrument associated with the recently discovered Chauvet cave in France. See the documentary video by Werner Herzog titled Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). 25. See HuffPost Arts and Culture; “Colonizing Abstraction: MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction Show Denies Its Ancient Global Origins,” blog entry by G. Roger Denson, February 15, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/g-roger-denson/ colonizing-abstraction-mo_b_2683159.html. 26. On the binary/dualistic/digital implications of what some have called abstract “paleosigns” see especially the work of Andre Leroi-Gourhan (Prehistoric Man, 1957) and Alexander Marshack. Marshack’s work shows how Paleolithic abstract marks and stylized figurative imagery are “time factored” and, as shamanistic sign systems, communicate myth and ritual messages about the cycles of cosmic and human life (The Roots of Civilization, passim). For Neolithic abstract symbolism that moves in the direction of linguistic markings see Maria Gimbutas’s work (e.g., The Language of the Goddess, 1989). 27. See, for example, the interesting discussion by Cari Ferraro, “Sacred Script: Ancient Marks from Old Europe,” 2010, http://cariferraro.com/library/ sacred-script/. 28. On Finster and Basquiat see Roberta Smith’s “Outsiders Who Specialized in Talking Pictures,” New York Times, November 19, 1989. 29. Alexander Marshack, in his Roots of Civilization (pp. 170–172), has a fascinating but speculative discussion of Paleolithic x marks as myth-ritual signs associated with ibex drawings. 30. Among other works see Ellen Dissanayake, “The Arts after Darwin: Does Art Have an Origin and Adaptive Function?” in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, ed. K. Zijlmans and W. van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008), pp. 241–263. 31. See especially Boyd, On the Origin of Stories; and Gottschall’s Storytelling Animal. 32. See two pages at the Interesting Ideas website: www.interestingideas. com/out/finster/index.htm?ref=www.espinashop.com and www.interestingideas.com/out/finster/pages/finblue.htm. 33. All quotes in this paragraph are from William Swislow, “Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden near Summerville, GA, circa 1988–1990,” Interesting Ideas, 2000, www.interestingideas.com/out/finster/index.htm?ref=www.espinashop.com. 34. Jeffrey Kripal, interviewed by Troy Williams, “Mutants and Mystics: The Jeffrey Kripal Interview,” TroyWilliams.com, April 30, 2014, http://troydwilliams.com/2012/04/30/mutants-and-mystics-the-jeffrey-kripal-interview/. 35. Ibid.

5. the finster mythos 1. See Tom Patterson’s introduction to Howard Finster, Stranger from Another World (New York: Abbeville, 1989), pp. 24–25. In like manner, John

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F. Turner notes that Finster’s stories were “well rehearsed” (Howard Finster: Man of Visions; The Life and Work of a Self-Taught Artist [New York: Knopf, 1989], p. ix). 2. I borrow the idea of a “redemptive self” associated with a person who sees himself as a special “man of destiny” from Dan McAdams’s “American Identity: The Redemptive Self,” in General Psychologist 43 (2008): 20–27. 3. This information comes from a conversation I had with John C. Turner in Summerville in 2012. 4. I am quoting from a copy of a typed poem that Finster gave to John F. Turner, which I use here with permission. 5. The last verse of the “Saucers” poem is: “This world is not our home / We will leave it far behind.” 6. The image of the “stranger banner” is taken from Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 53. Turner dates this painting (no. 1048) to 1978, whereas Patterson says 1977. For another copy of this banner see Patterson, Howard Finster, Stranger, p. 23. 7. Another interesting, and aesthetically appealing, version of the Stranger image is the painting Howard Finster in his winter cloths (no. 4111, 1985, Rick Berman Collection). An image of this painting is found in the catalog Howard Finster (1916–2001): Revealing the Masterworks (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Art Galleries, 2004), p. 21. 8. This “seen a story” jotting is found in a handwritten document in the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection © Thomas E. Scanlin. 9. Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Serpent’s Gift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 170. 10. Ibid., p. 171. 11. Liza Kirwin’s “Oral History Interview with Howard Finster, 1984 June 11,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, p. 16 (my pagination of the printed transcript), www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-historyinterview-howard-finster-12492. 12. Ibid. 13. On these basic plots see Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), pp. 127–129. 14. Ibid., p. 132. 15. See Gottschall, Storytelling Animal, pp. 51–56. 16. Ibid., p. 51. 17. Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 228 18. Ibid., p. 152. This painting uses enamel chaotically swirled on glass, giving rise to a found-image vision of Finster as a baby. 19. With regard to Finster’s claim that at one point in his life he “told fortunes as a mind reader,” see Turner’s Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 51. 20. I am quoting here from an email communication (c. 2013) from John F. Turner, but also see his book Howard Finster: Man of Visions, pp. 23–51. 21. I take this version of the giant commanding Finster to “get on the altar” from Patterson’s Stranger from Another World, p. 106. This account places the vision in the 1960s, after Finster had first arrived in Pennville from Trion, and was the inspiration for the Garden. Other accounts (based on what Finster

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recounted) associate the event with the command to paint sacred art in the 1970s—see, for example, n. 32 in this chapter. 22. Thelma Finster Bradshaw, Howard Finster: The Early Years; A Private Portrait of America’s Premier Folk Artist (Birmingham, AL: Crane Hill, 2001), pp. 123–125. 23. One of the earliest versions is found on a drawing in Finster’s Folk Image broadsheet (no. 1440, c. 1979), which connects the stranger theme with the finger story. The passage runs as follows: “A Stranger. I Howard Finster was a small engine macanic and painted motors, bycycles and mowers. One day I dipped my finger in white paint to patch a bad spot and I looked on end of my finger to see if I had to much paint and behold a human face was on the round tip of my finger and a warm feeling come over my body saying paint sacred art. So I begin to paint land scapes and clouds with the same finger tip and now I am painting on my one thousand and four hundred and fortieth painting since 1976. In 4 more months I should have out fifteen hundred paintings for God showed me how to.” It is a curious point that Finster did not, as far as I know, produce a painting of this pivotal event in his life. 24. In the mid-1980s Rick Berman ran the Clayworks gallery in Atlanta and helped Finster put together a “traveling” show of Finster artworks that included some of these “almost” first works. The Thomas E. Scanlin Collection, too, includes other examples of “first” works. On a work that Finster had written “Howards First Number One,” he remarks that since the mid-1970s his “visions [had] multiplied unbelievabl[y]. I could not draw all of them.” 25. On the religious and aesthetic significance of the mediated sacrality, or holiness, of relics and artworks, see the film by Roger Manley and Peter Friedman titled Mana: Beyond Belief. For a fascinating rumination on mana in the history of religions see Jonathan Z. Smith’s “Manna, Mana Everywhere and / / /,” in Relating Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. ˘˘ 144. “Routinization of charisma” was defined by the sociologist Max Weber and refers to the charisma of a foundational figure that is assimilated into ongoing bureaucratic structures. 26. Kirwin, “Oral History Interview with Howard Finster,” p. 19 (my pagination). 27. For an engaging description of Finster’s road trip with John F. Turner to Graceland, with reflections on the significance of Finster’s Summerville “mansion,” see Turner’s “On the Road to the Presley Mansion,” Raw Vision no. 78 (2013). 28. See Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 202; and Turner’s “On the Road.” 29. Vernon Chadwick, ed., In Search of Elvis Music, Race, Art, Religion (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 208, 215, 208. The title and idiosyncratic transcription of Finster’s speech is by Chadwick. 30. See the account given in Patterson, Howard Finster, Stranger, pp. 174– 178. 31. Chadwick, In Search of Elvis, pp. 218–220. 32. Concerning the giant-man vision, see the account in Victor Faccinto’s essay in Howard Finster: Man of Visions, the catalog for the show by that title

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at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1984. In this account (unlike Patterson’s version in note 21), the event is said to have happened in the summer of 1976, when Finster was told to “get on the altar” and “paint sacred art.” 33. The painting in question is And the Moon Became as Blood, paint on Masonite, c. 1976. Shown in Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 109. 34. The scholarship on shamans and shamanism is too immense to cite here. The classic work is Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (New York: Pantheon, 1964); this work was originally published in French in 1951. Let me note only that, while Eliade’s work has been controversial, recent developments in the study of Paleolithic tradition and other anthropological/ ethnographic studies are tending to support many of Eliade’s findings. For some of the history of scholarship surrounding shamanism see Ronald Hutton’s Shamans, Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination (London: Hambledon, 2001); Gloria Flaherty’s Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and especially Andrei Znamenski’s The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 35. See I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1989); and the classic work by V. Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed (New York: Mentor Books, 1965). 36. On all these issues of shamanizing see especially Eliade, Shamanism, pp. 3–32; and Anne Brodzky, Rose Daneswich, and Nick Johnson, eds., Stones, Bones and Skin: Ritual and Shamanic Art (Toronto: Society for Art Publications, 1977). 37. See Michael Tucker’s Dreaming with Open Eyes: The Shamanic Spirit in Twentieth Century Art and Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 1992) for the relation between shamanism and the arts from a mostly Jungian perspective. And for performative, theatrical, and carnivalesque aspects of shamanizing see Tae-ton Kim and Mihaly Hoppal, eds., Shamanism in Performing Arts (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1995). 38. See the discussion and sources cited in chapter 4. 39. Homology (based on a shared common ancestor) and analogy (no necessary structural descent but sharing similarities and differences) are key principles for the comparative method of “morphology” in Mircea Eliade’s approach to the study of religion as, for example, shown in his Patterns in Comparative Religion (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1963). In terms of comparative theory in the history of religions see Jonathan Z. Smith’s Drudgery Divine (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1990) and, in Relating Religion, his discussion of Mircea Eliade’s “morphology” (chaps. 2 and 3). 40. See especially the important recent work by Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive. Also helpful is Richard Noll, “Mental Imagery Cultivation as a Cultural Phenomenon: The Role of Visions in Shamanism,” Current Anthropology 26 (1985): 443–461. In the domain of outsider art, the gallerist and independent scholar Randall Morris rightly emphasizes that “there is a huge difference between being a shaman and being shamanistic. Shamanistic is what we have in our blood. There are very few shamans. But it is a universal human urge.” This quotation and the Morris epigram to my chapter 5 are from a

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Yahoo group email circular on “outsider art” dated Friday, April 22, 2011, at 10:24:48. 41. In general, on shamanism and celestial journeys see especially Eliade, Shamanism; and Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 42. Kirwin, “Oral History Interview with Howard Finster,” pp. 24–25 (my pagination). 43. John F. Turner, email communication, May 16, 2013. 44. Ibid. 45. This is the only photo I know of that shows Finster in a trance state. I am indebted to John F. Turner for the photo and his recollections of the event. Used with permission. 46. As Peter Schjeldahl says, “Finster’s talent is essentially eidetic, reliant on the capacity that makes us see faces in clouds and cracked walls. He evolves images and ideas from the accidental properties of his materials and from dreams, visions, and irrational associations. He trusts in chance and the unconscious, and they reward him with wonderful things.” “About Reverence,“ Village Voice, August 31, 1982, p. 73. 47. See, among other works, Joan Halifax, Shaman: The Wounded Healer (New York: Crossroads, 1982). 48. I borrow this expression from Tom Patterson, Howard Finster, Stranger, p. 21. 49. On most of these symbolic themes see Eliade, Shamanism, pp. 110–144. 50. See Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 14. Turner quotes Finster as saying, “The first rockets I’ve ever seen was in the comic books. I think it was Roy Rogers. I believe it was some kind of Rogers [Buck Rogers]. I was interested in those rockets. It looked impossible for something to fly through the air like a bullet and no propeller on it.” Turner’s interpolation of “Buck Rogers” for Finster’s “some kind of Rogers” seems appropriate—especially given the stylistic affinities of Finster’s Gladonia Super Angel and the comic-book vessels of Buck Rogers (late 1920s through the 1940s) and Flash Gordon (1930s through the 1960s). 51. Ibid., pp. 200, 202. 52. Patterson, Howard Finster, Stranger, p. 35. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., pp. 165–166. 55. Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 199. The source of the Turner quotation is not identified, and it is different from the “I am my own T.V.” quotation found on a thought card in the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection (see my chapter 3). 56. See, for example, ibid., p. 200; and Patterson, Howard Finster, Stranger, p. 166. Another version of Finster’s Hitler-in-hell vision is found on a thought card in the Thomas E. Scanlin Collection. 57. Patterson, Howard Finster Stranger, p. 166. 58. Ibid., p. 33; and Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, pp. 14, 202. 59. Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 202.

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60. Ibid. 61. Jim Arient, “A Trip to Paradise (Garden): How the Arients Met Howard Finster,” in Stranger in Paradise: The Works of Reverend Howard Finster (Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, 2009), p. 82. 62. I borrow this expression from Tom Patterson, Howard Finster, Stranger, p. 25. 63. See ibid., pp. 58–59. 64. On the shamanistic aspects of born-again evangelical preaching see Amanda Porterfield’s “Shamanism: A Psychosocial Definition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55, no. 4 (1987): 721–739. 65. William James (especially referring to his Varieties of Religious Experience, The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion [Edinburgh, 1901–1902]) is quoted and discussed by Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, p. 200–201. 66. Howard Finster, Howard Finsters Vision of 1982. Vision of 200 Light Years Away. Space Born of Three Generations. From Earth to the Heaven of Heavens (Summerville, GA:, 1982). The book was also reprinted. The quotations are from the cover. Susan Hankla was one of the first commentators to recognize the significance of this work. 67. Ibid., pp. 88–100. 68. See Patterson, Howard Finster, Stranger, pp. 179, 181. 69. This synopsis is taken from pages 1–87 of Howard Finsters Vision of 1982. I do not cite every episode or quotation in what follows. J. B. White was an actual boyhood friend of Finster—see Bradshaw’s Howard Finster: The Early Years, pp. 39–40. 70. On the shamanistic theme of skeletization, see Eliade, Shamanism, pp. 156–159. 71. Finster, Howard Finsters Vision of 1982, p. 81. 72. Ibid., p. 87. 73. See Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, p. 201. She quotes Santayana (as I do in the epigraphs at the front of my book): “Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy; its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in—whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or not—is what we mean by having a religion.” 74. See Mary Anne Staniszewski, Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art (New York: Penguin, 1995). 75. Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, p. 202. 76. Ibid., p. 203. As Zaleski also says, “Although most of us do not seek visions . . . , we can at least respect the testimony of vision literature as an extreme instance of the legitimate imaginative means through which one can instill a religious sense of the cosmos” (p. 203). 77. See Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying.” This essay was included in his collection of essays titled Intentions, published in 1891. Available online: www. victorianweb.org/authors/wilde/decay.html. 78. On the symbolic and otherworldly imaginative significance of UFOs and flying saucers see, for example, Douglas Curran, In Advance of the Landing:

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Folk Concepts of Outer Space (1985, reprint; New York: Abbeville Press, 2001).

6. snakes in the garden 1. John F. Turner provided me with a copy of an undated clipping from the Summerville News (1960s or 1970s) that refers to Finster’s environment as “Mr. Finster’s Pine Springs Museum Park.” The name refers to the watery nature of the land, which was fed by local springs. It seems that the name the Plant Farm Museum came somewhat later, and then Paradise Garden. 2. The name Paradise Garden was inspired by the December 1975 Esquire magazine article “Backyards,” which designated Finster’s yard art as the “Garden of Paradise” (the article was compiled by Barbara Damrosch). A good overview of the history and significance of Paradise Garden is given in the government forms, and the narrative by Keith Hébert (“Paradise Gardens,” pp. 9–18), connected with the Garden’s entry into the National Register of Historic Places on March 27, 2012. See United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form,” February 13, 2012, www.nps.gov/nr/feature/weekly_features/2012/ParadiseGardens.pdf. 3. For a description of the construction of the World’s Folk Art Church see Tom Patterson, Howard Finster, Stranger from Another World (New York: Abbeville, 1989), pp. 147–159. The Phyllis Kind Gallery had an archive of Finster photographic slides that included a number of images of the church during various phases of construction. Many Finster slides and transparencies from the Phyllis Kind Gallery are now in the Roger Brown Study Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. 4. In an email communication (c. 2013), John F. Turner says that Finster had a local funeral parlor donate the coffin with the understanding that he would advertise their business in Paradise Garden. 5. See the printed pamphlet titled Howard Finster’s Vision Sights and Wonders (n.p., n.d.). © Thomas E. Scanlin Collection. The pamphlet was commissioned by Scanlin. 6. See the online Summerville News account (“Folk Artist Howard Finster’s Body Moved Last Weekend,” August 13, 2010) of his reinterment in November 2009, http://thesummervillenews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=ar ticle&id=3443&catid=1&Itemid=1. According to family testimony, he wrote a letter on January 2, 1997, that said, “I, Howard Finster, make my last burial request, to be buried by my wife Pauline who has been so great to me all these years. I want the honor to be buried with her, anywhere she chooses is fine to me.” 7. For one version of the giant man vision see Patterson, Howard Finster, Stranger, pp. 106–107. Finster was told to “get on the altar,” which he finally understood as a command to undertake the herculean work involved in creating the garden. See also the discussion in chapter 5. 8. The poem is part of Jonathan Williams’s “Man of Visions!!” Jargon Society website, n.d., http://jargonbooks.com/finster.html. Emphasis in the original. 9. On the Camps and their relationship with Finster see John Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions; The Life and Work of a Self-Taught Artist (New York:

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Knopf, 1989), pp. 104–118. The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution includes a large deposit of papers, letters, and other ephemera from the Camps, not all of which is accessible. 10. In an email communication (June 27, 2013), John F. Turner tells me that he first heard of Finster in 1975, when the writer of the Esquire article on Finster’s garden (Barbara Damrosch) told Turner about her research for her article. Turner, who already had an interest in “folk environments,” contacted Finster by mail and got a tape cassette back on which Finster had recorded a one-hour tour of the Garden. Then in 1981, Finster stayed at Turner’s house in California during an exhibition of Finster’s work at the Braunstein Gallery in San Francisco. Afterward Turner repeatedly visited Finster in Georgia and maintained a friendship with him until his death. For accounts of others who developed an early relationship with Finster see, among others, Patterson’s Howard Finster, Stranger and Jim Arient’s “A Trip to Paradise (Garden): How the Arients Met Howard Finster,” in Stranger in Paradise: The Works of Reverend Howard Finster (Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, 2009), pp. 75–84. 11. For the stranger mytheme as related to Finster see chapter 5. 12. See Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 54. 13. See Jeffrey Kripal’s meditation on this theme in his Serpent’s Gift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 1–27, 162–179. 14. Williams, “Man of Visions!!” 15. On the artist Kata Billups and her relation with Finster see “Why Aren’t You a Preacher,” Kata Billups website, n.d., http://katabillups.wix.com/katabillups-aug-2012#!__close-up/%22why-aren%27t-you-a-preacher%22. See also “Kata Billups: Contemporary Elvis Artist Extraordinaire,” Elvis Information Network, n.d., www.elvisinfonet.com/spotlight_katabillups.html. 16. This quote is from Monty Python’s famous “Dead Parrot” scene in the “Pet Shop” sketch first aired in 1969. The TV script for this sketch is found at MontyPython.net, www.montypython.net/scripts/petshop.php. 17. Finster’s remark about his ability to regenerate his skin like a lizard is found in my interview with him recorded in Summerville, Georgia, in 1992. 18. Lynda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), p. 69. “Art [like religion],” as Sexson says, “creates the reality it lives in.” 19. The anthropologist Victor Turner notes that “liminality, marginality, and structural inferiority are conditions in which are frequently generated myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works of art.” These are “cultural forms” that provide a crafty tinkerer, outlier, or visionary “with a set of templates or models which are, at one level, periodical reclassifications of reality and man’s relationship to society, nature, and culture.” The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1969). 20. See especially Katherine Harmon’s You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). 21. For a popular and humorous discussion of “paradise lust” within Western biblical tradition, see Brook Wilensky-Lanford, Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (New York: Grove Press, 2011).

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22. On Mr. Imagination (Gregory Warmack) see my article and interview “At Home Then and Now with Mr Imagination,” Elsewhere: The International Journal of Self-Taught and Outsider Art, no. 1 (August 2013): 14–27. On Charlie Lucas see “Charlie Lucas,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, last updated February 10, 2014, www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-3388. On Lonnie Holley, see Mark Binelli’s “Lonnie Holley: The Insider’s Outsider,” New York Times, January 23, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/magazine /lonnie-holley-the-insiders-outsider.html?_r=0). 23. On art as the “work that is play,” see Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred, p. 84. 24. These quotations are from an undated Finster thought card in the Larry Schlachter Collection. 25. Roger Cardinal, “The Vulnerability of Outsider Architecture,” Southern Quarterly (Fall–Winter 2000–2001): 170. 26. On the decrepitude of Paradise Garden see Tom Patterson, “Paradise before and after the Fall,” Raw Vision 35 (2001): 42–51; and Carol Crown, “Paradise Revisited: The Desecration and Reclamation of Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden,” Number 39 (Summer 2001): 28–33.

7. the strange beauty of bad and nasty art 1. Finster is quoted in N. J. Girardot and Ricardo Viera, “Howard Finster,” Art Journal 53 (1994): 49. 2. See Nancy G. Heller’s Why a Painting Is Like a Pizza: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 3. See especially Pierre Bourdieu’s destructive sociological analysis of the modernist “religion of art” in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 4. On the waning of evaluative art criticism see James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). See also Elkins’s “Naïfs, Faux-Naïfs, Faux-Faux Naïfs, Would-Be Faux-Naïfs: There Is No Such Thing as Outsider Art,” James Elkins.com, 2006, www.jameselkins. com/images/stories/jamese/pdfs/outsiderart.pdf. 5. Peter Schjeldahl, “Howard Finster,” in The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 148. This essay was originally published as “About Reverence,” in the Village Voice, on August 31, 1982. 6. See Roger Cardinal, “Toward an Outsider Aesthetic,” in The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture, ed. Michael D. Hall and Eugene W. Metcalf Jr. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), pp. 20–43. 7. See the exhibition curated by Brooke Davis Anderson, Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger, discussed in Nicole J. Caruth, “Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger,” ART21 Magazine, June 2, 2008, http://blog. art21.org/2008/06/02/contemporary-artists-and-henry-darger/. 8. See Charles Russell’s introduction to Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art, ed. Russell (Jackson: University Press of

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Mississippi, 2001). I borrow some of these observations from Jennifer Borum, Randall Morris, and Colin Rhodes as originally presented on the Outsider Art web-based discussion group. On Alfred Barr see Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Boston: MIT Press, 2003). 9. The affinities between Finster, Keith Haring, and Andy Warhol were displayed in the exhibition “Pop! Pop! Pop!” at the Skot Foreman Fine Art galleries in Atlanta, Georgia, January 16–February 29, 2004. 10. See Cardinal’s discussion, “Toward an Outsider Aesthetic,” pp. 33–35 . 11. Kenneth Clark, What Is a Masterpiece? (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1979), p. 44. 12. See Jakob Rosenberg, On Quality in Art: Criteria of Excellence Past and Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 229. 13. Ernst Gombrich, “How Do You Know It’s Any Good?” review of On Quality in Art, by Jakob Rosenberg, New York Review of Books 10 (1968). See www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1968/feb/01/how-do-you-know-its-anygood/. 14. On the mystique of the Mona Lisa and museum culture see especially Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Walter Cahn, Masterpieces: Chapters on the History of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 15. For the quotations in this paragraph see the article “Masterpiece,” in Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (New York: Grove Press, 1996), vol. 20, p. 600. 16. See especially the discussions by Belting throughout Invisible Masterpiece, and Cahn throughout Masterpieces, of “the absolute masterpiece” and the influence of Honoré de Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece” (Le Chefd’oeuvre inconnu; 1831). 17. Calling himself the “Man of Visions,” Finster painted the “Spirit of Mona Lisa” in 1981 (no. 1891), which shows a shadowy, semitransparent, cartoonlike image of Mona Lisa. The front of this work is inscribed with a verse from Ecclesiastes 3:21 (“Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward and the beast that goeth downward to the earth”), and the back is scrawled with Finster’s own notation regarding a vision he had about going down into the center of the earth. This work is in the Arient Family Collection. Finster went on to paint many later, more highly stylized cutouts and prints of Mona Lisa. 18. A collector and longtime friend of Finster, John Denton, remembers that Finster was always concerned with making his art as attractive and marketable as possible—especially for those who were not Christians and needed to have some aesthetic reason for being interested in the work. Finster believed that eventually his messages would get through to even the most hardened infidels. Personal communication, c. 2004. 19. On the Lasters see their website: Lasters Art Shack, www.lastersartshack. com/shack.html. 20. I became somewhat infamous when I did a course at Lehigh in the late 1990s titled Jesus, Buddha, Mao, and Elvis. See the description of the course and the ensuing controversy in Daniel Rubin, “Oh, Come Let Us Now Worship

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Elvis the King,” Philadelphia Enquirer, August 13, 1997, http://articles.philly. com/1997–08–13/entertainment/25568046_1_presleyterians-elvis-and-jesusvernon-chadwick; and my “But Seriously: Taking the Elvis Phenomenon Seriously,” Religious Studies News 11 (1996):11–12. 21. Henry Glassie, The Spirit of Folk Art (New York: Henry Abrams, 1989). See also Glassie’s The Potter’s Art (Philadelphia: Material Culture and Indiana University Press, 1999) and his Haskins Prize Lecture for 2011: A Life of Learning, ACLS Occasional Paper, no. 68 (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 2011), available as a PDF file: www.acls.org/uploadedFiles/Publications /OP/Haskins/68_2011_HenryGlassie.pdf. 22. The quotations in this paragraph are from Glassie, The Spirit of Folk Art, pp. 36–41, 87, 258. 23. See Glassie, The Spirit of Folk Art; and Barbara Bode, “The Art of People, Period,” review of The Spirit of Folk Art, by Henry Glassie, New York Times, January 21, 1990, www.nytimes.com/1990/01/21/books/the-art-ofpeople period.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm. 24. Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997). 25. As Glassie says, “The product of religious societies, folk art is typological, conceptual, spiritual. The product of secular societies, fine art is descriptive, sensual, materialistic. That contrast is too severe, too clear, but its essential validity will gain support from consideration of art that mixes the key traits of folk art and fine art” (Spirit of Folk Art, pp. 128–129). 26. See Charles Russell’s discussion of these and related issues in his SelfTaught Art, especially pp. 28–34. 27. Bode, “The Art of People, Period”; and I also make reference to a lecture given by Glassie in November 2012 at Lehigh University. On the “optimal experience” or “flow” of “in the moment” artistic passion, see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). 28. The painted works of the late 1970s were really not Finster’s first artworks, painted or otherwise—although it was only after 1976 that he took up painting as his main vocation. Thomas Scanlin makes the helpful observation that there is a clear sequence in Finster’s method of signing and dating his early works—that is, works that predate or are dated just after the mythic moment in January of 1976. Thus at some point in the mid-1970s, Finster tended to paint a small facial icon of himself, to which he eventually added a reference to the time it took to complete the work. At some later time he put only a time notation on the finished work. Soon afterward there appeared his famous numbering system, and finally, sometime in the early 1980s, the numbering system with his signature and date. Then around 1989 he started to include the stick figure of the peace bird/dove. (Personal communication, c. 2004.) 29. These early works are often sloppy in composition and coloration, as well as chaotically busy in terms of subject matter. Examples are I Dreamed the World Came to an End (1975–1976) and We Love the Redwood Forests (1977). For images of these works see Glen Davies, Stranger in Paradise: The Works of Reverend Howard Finster (Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, 2009), pp. 28, 61.

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30. Quoted in John F. Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions; The Life and Work of a Self-Taught Artist (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. ix. 31. Vision of Mary’s Angel (1987) is in the Michael and Laura Paula Aronstein Collection. 32. The Philadelphia gallerist John Ollman rightfully notes that Finster only gradually “learned how to manipulate the enamel and started taking more risks. At first he worried about painting a human face. Then he learned to make more complex paintings because he had acquired an extended vocabulary. His first six hundred paintings were religious and narrative.” And then at around a thousand paintings, “his works began to soar in terms of complexity, his use of different media.” Moreover, it was at this time that Finster’s visions became the special subject of his paintings. And by 1981, “there was a dramatic increase in the number of secondary paintings that were mixed with the masterpieces.” John Ollman, quoted in Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions, p. 163. 33. A notable moment in this painterly evolution took place in December 1985, when Finster painted his five thousandth work of art, thus completing his response to the “call” to produce that many messages from God. As he has written on both the front and the back of this work, he had accomplished his goal to “reach around the world.” His message says he is now “free” to do what he wants with his art. But this freedom led only to an even more frenzied production of works, many of diminished quality. For an image of the five thousandth work and the inscription on the back, see Davies, Stranger in Paradise, pp. 44–45. The painting is in the John Denton Collection. 34. Quoting Gombrich, “How Do You Know It’s Any Good?” 35. See “Masterpiece,” Dictionary of Art, p. 600. See the entry “Masterpiece (or Chef d’oeuvre)” in The Oxford Companion to Western Art, ed. Hugh Brigstocke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 403. 36. The formalist perspective has primarily to do with the visual experience of the art object itself—that is, the human emotional response to certain fundamental properties seen in the appearance, handling, and materiality of the art (the medium, technique, organization, etc.). Formalism corresponds to the basic evolutionary pleasure human beings take when viewing symmetrical patterns and other configurative forms of rhythmic balance in images—especially if those perceived patterns are anthropomorphically suggestive. Clearly these formal visual and experiential practices (what is seen in the art object and how the viewer feels about it) are never isolated from the more analytical procedures associated with what we contextually know about the art, the artist, and the cultural situation. 37. For this and the other quotations in this paragraph see Cardinal, “Toward an Outsider Aesthetic,” pp. 20–43. 38. Amazement as an aesthetic reaction does not, of course, apply only to visionary and outsider art. For a “natural history” of wonderment and amazement in relation to Western art, see John Onians, “ ‘I Wonder . . .’: A Short History of Amazement,” in Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E. H. Gombrich at 85, ed. Onians (London: Phaidon, 1994), pp. 11–33. 39. Leonard Diepeveen and Timothy Van Laar, Art with a Difference: Looking at Different and Unfamiliar Art (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000), pp. 85–88.

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40. Ibid., p. 85–87. 41. Quoted from “Andy Warhol, Biography Quotes and Facts on Pop Art Print and Music Life in ‘The Factory,’ ” from the website Famous Artist Quotes, Their Art Statements and Life and Biography Facts, www.quotes-famousartists.org/warhol-andy-quotes.

conclusion 1. See, for example, the article by Robin Pogrebin, “Chastened, Folk Art Museum Puts Down Healthier Roots,” New York Times, April 2, 2013, www. nytimes.com/2013/04/03/arts/design/american-folk-art-museum-puts-downhealthier-roots.html?_r=0. See also Amy Pogrebin, “To Raze or Not? MoMA Rethinks Plan,” New York Times, May 9, 2013; and Michael Kimmelman, “Defending a Scrap of Soul against MoMA” New York Times, May 12, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/defending-the-former-americanfolk-art-museum-building.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 2. See Roberta Smith’s review “No More on the Outside Looking in: ‘Great and Mighty Things,’ at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” New York Times, April 20, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/arts/design/great-and-mighty-things-atthe-philadelphia-museum-of-art.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. On the popularity of the Museum of Everything see, for example, Charlotte Philby, “Out of This World,” Independent Magazine (London), October 8, 2011, pp. 3–35; and Jonathan Griffin, “Everything But,” Manifesta Journal (Amsterdam), no. 12 (2011). On these recent developments see, for example, the announcement about the 2013 Venice Biennale and the Encyclopedic Palace at La Biennale di Venezia website: www.labiennale.org/en/art/news/13–03.html. On the outsider art fair in Paris in 2013 see Leigh Anne Miller “Art in America: Outsider Art Fair Expands to Paris,” Outsider Art Fair, June 6, 2013, http://outsiderartfair.com/sites/default /files/2013.06.06%20ARTINAMERICA%20-%20Expands%20to%20Paris .pdf. Regarding the “breakthrough” versus “bubble” analysis of the current situation, I am referring to comments by the gallerist and commentator Randall Morris in an email of June 7, 2013. 3. Wolfe was quoting from Tom Stoppard’s 1972 play Artist Descending a Staircase: “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” 4. On Warhol’s explicit and implicit religiosity see Eleanor Heartney, Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2004). 5. See the following obituary for Pauline Finster: “Mrs. Odessa Pauline Finster Obit (EP),” AM 1180 Chattooga Country Radio website, March 2, 2013, http://chattooga1180.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34 832&Itemid=46. 6. See, for example, “Four Approaches to the Treatment of Historic Properties,” National Park Service/ U.S. Department of Interior website, n.d., www. nps.gov/tps/standards/four-treatments.htm. I am indebted to Jordan Poole for this reference.

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7. For later developments in the Garden see Howard Pousner, “Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden Blooms Anew,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 24, 2013, www.myajc.com/news/entertainment/howard-finsters-paradise-gardenblooms-anew/nX3Fn/#K. 8. For some of the controversy involving Tommy Littleton’s group and the Paradise Garden Foundation see Betsy Riley, “Paradise Regained,” Atlanta, June 21, 2013, www.atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/paradise-regained/. 9. On Leonardis and some of the Garden controversy before the arrival of the Paradise Garden Foundation, see Brenda Goodman’s “Saving a Folk Artist’s Paradise, Lost to Weeds and Ruin, Is a Tangled Affair,” New York Times, October 25, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/arts/design/25gard.html?pagewanted= all&_r=0. 10. On recent developments at the Garden see Howard Pousner, “New Visitor Center Captures Eccentric Vibe of Howard Finster,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 25, 2013, www.myajc.com/news/entertainment/new-visitor-centercaptures-eccentric-vibe-of-howa/nbXkc/. See also my “‘Without a Place for Vision the People Perish’: Born Again, Howard Finster and His Enduring Garden,” Folk Art Messenger (Fall–Winter 2013): 5–9. 11. Piers Vitebsky, Shamanism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), p. 110. 12. See chapter 4, pp. 111–113. 13. The inscription on the front of the painting reads (in a voice bubble coming from a Finsterian cheetah): “Howard Finster at the End of the Millennium, #00015 painting for Howard & Family. 10:58 pm Nov 29, 1989 Norman Girardot.” On the back of the painting is my modified version of Ecclesiastes 12:9– 14. My version reads as follows: “Besides being wise, Howard taught the people knowledge and weighed, scrutinized and arranged many proverbs. Howard sought to find pleasing sayings, and to paint true sayings with precision. The sayings of the wise are like goads; like fixed spikes are the paintings given by one collector. As to more than these, beware of the making weariness for the flesh. In vision there is life. The last word, when all is heard and seen: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is man’s all, because God will bring to judgment every work, with all its hidden qualities, whether good or bad.” 14. See chapter 5. 15. Liza Kirwin, “Oral History Interview with Howard Finster, 1984 June 11,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, p. 16 (my pagination of the printed transcript), www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-historyinterview-howard-finster-12492. 16. John F. Turner of Berkeley has reminded me of Finster’s rage over what he felt were Jeff Camp’s duplicitous tactics as a dealer (discussed in several email communications sent to me, one on August 31, 2013). 17. I am very appreciative of Pamela Turner’s willingness to send me a copy of the script. See the reviews: Andrew Alexander’s “7 Stages’ ‘Hidden Man’ Has Moments of Greatness, But Never Quite Gels,” ArtsAtl, March 12, 2012, www. artsatl.com/2012/03/review-the-hidden-man-has-moments-of-greatness-butneeds-strong-narrative-pull/; Curt Holman’s “Hidden Man Paints an Affection-

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ate Portrait of Howard Finster,” Creative Loafing, March 14, 2012, http://clatl. com/atlanta/hidden-man-paints-an-affectionate-portrait-of-howard-finster/ Content?oid=5007245; and Bert Osborne’s “Hidden Man Is Worth a Look,” Access Atlanta, March 12, 2012, www.accessatlanta.com/news/entertainment/ celebrity-news/theater-review-hidden-man-is-worth-a-look/nQzM2/. See also Anya99’s “Dreaming of the Hidden Man in Paradise Gardens: 7 Stages Explores the Enigmatic 1980s Friendship of Howard Finster and Robert Sherer,” AtlantaRetro, March 8, 2012, http://atlretro.com/2012/03/08/hidden/. 18. From the script by Russell Blackmon, “The Real Howard Finster,” dated 2002 and accessed online in 2014 at www.whohadada.com/archives/finsterscript/The%20Real%20Howard%20Finster.pdf (site discontinued). 19. In an email communication (c. April 2013), Pamela Turner says that the play’s “Temple of Sodomy” was largely artistic license. However, Robert Sherer told Turner that he had in fact worked on a mirrored construction in the Garden that quoted Romans. In the play, Romans 1:27 is quoted: “And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.” 20. See Sherer’s website: www.robertsherer.com/. 21. An article in the Rome News-Tribune by Lauren Jones titled “Howard Finster: A Man of Vision Remembered” (June 9, 2013), describes the views of the Summerville high school teacher and artist John C. Turner, who became a lifelong friend of Finster. As Turner says (and this was corroborated in my interview with Turner in Summerville in May 2013), Finster had a profound “penchant for eccentricity” that went back before his visionary breakthrough in 1976. See http://romenews-tribune.com/view/full_story/22846762/article-HowardFinster—A-Man-of-Vision-remembered?instance=home_most_popular. 22. See the following news accounts: “Criticism Given on Play about Howard Finster,” Summerville News, February 21, 2012; and Wayne Ford, “Howard Finster’s Daughter Objects to Play at UGA,” Onlineathens.com, February 18, 2012, http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2012–02–17/howardfinsters-daughter-objects-play-uga. 23. This story is told in an article by John F. Turner, “When Allen Ginsberg Met Howard Finster,” Raw Vision, no. 67 (Fall–Autumn 2009): 42–45, www. rawvision.com/articles/when-allen-ginsberg-met-howard-finster. 24. See the commentary by Art Rosenbaum, “ ‘Hidden Man’ Might Intrigue Finster,” OnlineAthens.com, February 22, 2012, http://onlineathens.com /opinion/2012–02–21/rosenbaum-hidden-man-might-intrigue-finster. 25. All the quotations in this paragraph are from one of Finster’s thought cards, c. early 1980s. From the collection of Larry Schlachter. 26. Quoted from an untitled clipping in the Rome News-Tribune, May 8, 1986. 27. On Finster’s “love” of infidels, atheists, and American communists, as well as the pleasures of “infidel chicken,” see the video Well Known Stranger: Howard Finster’s Workout, by Elizabeth Fine and Hazen Robert Walker (Cima Productions, 1987), 28 minutes. Available as streaming video at the Folkstreams.net website, www.folkstreams.net/film/207.

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28. Quoted from the translation by Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu [Zhuangzi] (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 49. 29. See “Folk Artist Howard Finster’s Body Moved Last Weekend,” Summerville News, August 13, 2010, http://thesummervillenews.com/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=3443&Itemid=2. 30. See Finster’s extended discussion of the burden of fame in the film Well Known Stranger, by Fine and Walker. 31. For background on Saint Peter and his crucifixion, see the article “St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles,” by Johann Peter Kirsch, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911), under the subheading “Activity and Death in Rome; Burial Place”; see the text beginning with: “Concerning the manner of Peter’s death, we possess a tradition—attested to by Tertullian at the end of the second century (see above) and by Origen (in Eusebius, Church History II.1)—that he suffered crucifixion.” Available at New Advent, www.newadvent.org/cathen/11744a.htm. It can be noted that, while Finster is crucified upside down, the cross he is on is not inverted. 32. This quotation is from an essay on Finster by Williams, which appears in Jerome Rothenberg, editor and compiler, “Outsider Poems, a Mini-Anthology in Progress (47): Jonathan Williams on ‘Howard Finster, Man of Visions,’ ” Jacket2, October 30, 2012, https://jacket2.org/commentary/outsider-poemsmini-anthology-progress-47-jonathan-williams-%E2%80%9Choward-finsterman-visions%E2%80%9D. The quote comes right after Williams’s poem on the bee’s knees, called “A Rhyme for Howard Finster.” More generally on the poet-publisher Jonathan Williams see Tom Patterson’s “If You Can Kill a Snake with It, It Ain’t Art: The Art History of a Maverick Poet-Publisher,” Jacket Magazine, last updated January 2009, http://jacketmagazine.com/38/jwd03patterson.shtml. This essay identifies the source of the Duck Woman of Orpliss as one of Finster’s “Cow Woman”–style cutout images in Williams’s personal collection of art.

Acknowledgments Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come. —Matthew 12:32

Ritually speaking, no one mentioned here is in any way to blame for what I have said, or not said, in this book. Many have inspired and guided me. Sometimes they rescued me from various pitfalls of incomplete knowledge, faulty interpretation, or simple hermeneutical silliness. A few have truly been my mentors in the circuitous journey that led to the writing of this book. All have made a difference. And to all I feel a deep debt of gratitude. No doubt I will fail to acknowledge some by name, but I will do my best. First of all, I am grateful to the Finster family, most significantly Howard Finster and his wife, Pauline. Two of Finster’s daughters, Thelma (T. J.) and Beverly, were incredibly gracious and helpful throughout the long process of writing. My sincerest thanks to them. Other family members who helped along the way include the grandchildren Chuck Cox, Allen Wilson, Michael Finster, and Andy Wilson. In terms of their crucial advice and ongoing assistance, I must mention certain important collectors, dealers, and special friends of the Finsters: Thomas and Tommye Scanlin of Dahlonega, Georgia; John C. Turner of Summerville, Georgia; Phyllis Kind of Chicago and New York; John Ollman of Philadelphia; Shari Caven and Randall Morris of New York; Pat Mcardle of Pittsburgh; Larry and Jane Schlachter of Cloudland, Georgia; John Denton of Hiawassee, Georgia; John Jerit of Memphis, Tennessee; Rick Berman of Atlanta, Georgia; Larry Clemons of Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Phillip March Jones in Lexington, Kentucky; and Jim, Beth, and Matt Arient of Naperville, Illinois. Others who have helped in noteworthy ways include Stephanie (RIP) and Bob Tardell; and George and Sue Viener. With respect to those who have worked to rescue Paradise Garden since Finster’s death, I want to acknowledge Beverly Finster, Tommy Littleton, and Whitney Nave Jones. Most recently, the new Paradise Garden Foundation under the direction of Janet Byington and Jordan Poole has made significant progress in bringing the Garden back to life. 255

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David Leonardis also deserves recognition for his efforts to preserve what he calls Finster’s “Vision House.” Among those in Atlanta who assisted me, I thank Susan Crawley, who, both before and after her work as the curator of folk art at the High Museum, was especially generous and supportive; Pamela Turner, who kindly sent me a copy of her play The Hidden Man; Howard Pousner for his always insightful Atlanta Journal & Constitution writings on the checkered legacy of the Finster-world in north Georgia; and Jerry Cullum of Art Papers. Others who have given assistance over the years are David Morgan at Duke University; Colin Rhodes at the University of Sydney; Roger Cardinal in England; and the filmmakers David and Susan Fetcho, along with the film producer and artist Steven Pattie, all in California. I also want to recognize the writer Tom Patterson; the art historian Carol Crown; the publisher of Raw Vision, John Maizels; the religion scholar Brent Plate; the collector and president of the Folk Art Society of America, Ann Oppenhimer; Liza Kirwin and the current staff at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; Bob Roth and Cleo Wilson of Intuit in Chicago; Ron Jagger of the former Phyllis Kind Gallery; the publisher and filmmaker Jodi Wille; and Rebecca Hoffberger of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Lisa Stone, curator of the Roger Brown Study Collection in association with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was extremely helpful in giving me access to the Phyllis Kind Gallery archives. Especially valuable was my association with the artist Glen C. Davies of Champaign, Illinois, who curated the Krannert Museum’s large retrospective traveling exhibition on Finster titled Stranger in Paradise/The Works of Reverend Howard Finster (2010). This exhibition was a comprehensive overview of Finster’s life and work; but as seen in this book, I am particularly appreciative of Davies’s work on Finster’s fascination with roadside parks and signage from the 1940s and into the 1970s. I’m thankful for the support and inspiration of many at Lehigh University, my home institution—especially my colleague, friend, artistic collaborator, and the director of the Lehigh University Art Galleries, Ricardo Viera. Moreover, the exceedingly professional staff of the Lehigh University Galleries deserves special thanks: Denise Stangl, Patricia Kandianis, Patricia MacAndrew, Mark Wonsidler, Jeff Ludwig, and Khalil Allaik. I’m grateful for the special encouragement and assistance of Marian Gaumer, Michael Raposa, Chava Weissler, Lloyd Steffen, and all my other colleagues in the religion studies department. I also acknowledge a number of colleagues and friends who were brave enough to read several earlier drafts of this book: Khurram Hussain, Rob Rozehnal, Ben Wright, and others of the reading seminar in the religion studies department at Lehigh; Ricardo Viera; Gregory Heller-LaBelle; Chris Girardot; Jimothy Difonzo; Matthew Mattern; Thomas Scanlin; Glen Davies; Susan Schwartz; George Jevremovic; Brent Plate; the Wizard of New Zealand (a.k.a. Ian Brackenbury Channell); Timothy Beal; John F. Turner; and Jodi Wille. None of the above are liable for what has come to pass, but I am truly thankful for their comments and critical suggestions. I would be remiss if I did not thank my brother, Joseph Girardot, who first set me on the Finster trail, and my two other brothers, Steven and James Girardot, who have put up with me during this long

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journey. Let me also say—speaking of a kind of extended professional family— that I have been blessed by an editor, Reed Malcolm at the University of California Press, who saw merit in the original idea for this book and, equally important, had the forbearance to not lose faith during the (too many) years it took to complete the manuscript. Stacy Eisenstark at the press has been a stalwart and ever helpful guide to the sometimes tedious production process; and Bonita Hurd has served as a remarkably perspicacious copyeditor. Thanks as well to my project editors, Chalon Emmons and Kate Hoffman. I am grateful that my three official readers of the manuscript were acute enough to recognize that they were dealing with what was potentially a good book struggling to emerge from an overly long, redundant, and indulgent penultimate draft. I thank them for their critical tolerance and their faith that I would do my best to produce a more concise and coherent text. I’m not sure that I have fully accomplished that task, but I think it is certainly a more readable and appealing work. It is also considerably shorter than the original manuscript. And with regard to Wikipedia, mum’s the word. Throughout my years of work on this book, I have been assisted in all sorts of exceptional ways by a number of truly outstanding people. First, let me recognize that most knowledgeable of Finster confidants and mavens, who is also a noted writer, curator, and filmmaker. I refer to John F. Turner, who has followed the fits and starts of the ever-evolving manuscript that led to this book and has never failed to warn me when I was dangerously close to careening off a hermeneutical cliff (somewhat in the manner of the old Saturday Night Live sketch, “Toonces, the Cat Who Could Drive”). This has been a working association that goes back to a meeting I had with John in Berkeley in 2011. It was then, as I went into an overwrought refrain about the shamanistic implications of the Finster phenomenon, that he smiled and pressed me on the issue of whether Finster was an evangelical shaman, saint, or shyster. I remember mumbling something about how it was probably some combination of those themes; the truth is that it took another three years to articulate a more meaningful response. John’s knowledge of all things Finster and his critical intelligence in these matters has helped to shape this book in all sorts of large and small ways. But he is, of course, not responsible for the results. Nor can I claim that I fully answered his initial challenge to me. Others in this category of exemplary helpers along the Finster trail include Thomas Scanlin, whose friendship with, and concern for, Howard and the Finster family has been extraordinary. Thomas deserves commendation for his patience in dealing with my frequent queries, as well as for his hospitality while I read through many Finster thought cards and materials in his extensive collection. Like John Turner, Thomas never hesitated to call attention to my penchant for interpretive hyperbole and textual prolixity. In like manner, the Arients (Jim, Beth, and Matt) have been uniquely knowledgeable guides to Finster and have been exceedingly gracious in sharing their experiences and collection with me. The filmmaker, publisher, and curator Jodi Wille was exceptionally generous, in the midst of many other obligations, in helping me produce a more insightful and readable manuscript. I need to mention another very special colleague, friend, artist, video maker, and digital maestro—namely, Steven Lichak, who is currently the director of the Digital Media Studio at Lehigh University.

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Having both an impressive technical expertise and a passion for self-taught artists (he is the head of the Frank Wyso Foundation), Steven has repeatedly and selflessly assisted in the preparation of the images and the accompanying video. I can’t thank him enough. I must acknowledge yet another indispensable helper, who is not only a master designer but also an accomplished artist in his own right: Matthew Mazurkiewicz, who is primarily responsible for a cover design that captures the revelatory strangeness of the Finsterian spirit. Somewhere Howard is smiling. Lastly and with loving appreciation I thank Diane LaBelle, architect, CEO of the Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and an indefatigable champion of children’s arts education. With extreme patience, prodding encouragement, and periodic amusement, she has monitored the slow progress of this work. Even more laudable was her willingness, amid a daunting schedule of work and during an all too brief respite in the Périgord region of the French Dordogne, to read through the whole manuscript at a crucial late stage of final revisions. More than anyone else, she knew to cut through to the simple narrative truth of things when academic blather was still overwhelming my efforts to tell the story. I know that I have not entirely purged the blather, but Diane’s critical eye has made for a better and more accessible book. July 2014

Illustrations

figures 1. Howard Finster, The Seven Invisible Members of Mankind / 6 2. Finster’s reenactment of his finger-face vision / 8 3. Finster as itinerant preacher on his car-chapel / 11 4. Howard Finster, Who Is Howard Finster? / 35 5. Finster baptizing women in a grotto / 39 6. Pauline and Howard Finster / 40 7. Howard Finster, Brain Cell Warehouse / 53 8. Howard, Snoopy, and Pauline / 57 9. Howard Finster, To John Turner from Howard Finstr (the unknown language) / 83 10. Howard Finster, Image/Emage of Elvis at 3 Yrs / 87 11. Howard Finster, Cloud portfolio (cloud-picture contact sheet) / 91 12. Howard Finster, Noah’s Ark: Ark Is Landing / 96 13. Howard Finster, Road to Eturnety / 117 14. Howard Finster, I am Howard Finster a Stranger from Another World / 120 15. Finster in a trance / 139 16. Cover of Howard Finsters Vision of 1982 / 145 17. Jose Tavel, Paradise Garden, map and legend, part 1 / 152 18. Jose Tavel, Paradise Garden, map and legend, part 2 / 153

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19. Detail from Howard Finster, Serpents of the Wilderness, the Paradise Garden serpent mound / 160 20. Howard Finster, They Used My Cross to Crucify / 216

plates following page 188 1. Howard Finster, Vision of Heavens West Wing 2. Howard Finster, There is a House of Gold 3. Howard Finster, The Way of Jesus 4. Howard Finster, Brian Scott 5. Howard Finster, Vision Map 6. Howard Finster, Howard Looks Upon a Piece of Planet 7. Kata Billups, Howard Shows Jesus Paradise Garden 8. Howard Finster, Wipe Rag Art 9. Howard Finster, The Angel Staff 10. Howard Finster, Vision of the Jane and Jeffrey Camp Vacation to the Planet URON 11. Howard Finster, Vision of Mary’s Angel 12. Howard Finster, Visions of Holy Crystal Cities Beyond 13. Howard Finster, Faith Goes In 14. Howard Finster, Empty Cross Trying to Tell the World Something 15. Howard Finster, Sneakers 16. Norman Girardot, Blue Boy Collage in the Spirit of Howard Finster

Credits and Permissions

Most images of Howard Finster’s artworks are used by special permission of the primary copyright holders—that is, The Howard Finster Estate as represented by the Executors, Pauline Finster (until her death) and then subsequently Thelma Finster Bradshaw. The only exceptions are the works noted in this book that are © Thomas E. Scanlin. Permission to use significantly revised and expanded versions of my earlier essays has been given by the copyright holders: The University of Memphis Art Museum for “Where There Is No Vision the People Perish: Visionary Artists and Religious-Based Environments in the American South,” originally published in Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South, 2004. The Krannert Art Museum and The Trustees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for “The Word Made Flesh: Howard Finster as PreacherPainter-Performance Artist,” originally published in Stranger in Paradise/The Works of Reverend Howard Finster, 2009. Lehigh University Art Galleries/LUAG-Museum Operations for “Bad and Nasty Art: Quantity and Quality in the Career of Howard Finster,” originally published in Howard Finster: Revealing the Masterworks, 2004; and “The World’s Folk Art Church: Reverend Howard Finster and Family,” originally published in The Finsters at Lehigh, 1986. Permission to use certain images, photos, videos; certain texts; and selections from previously published poems and song lyrics has been given by the copyright holders: Kay Ryan via Grove Atlantic; Thomas Meyer, executor of The Jonathan Williams Estate; The Thomas E. Scanlin Collection (plate 8, figure 10; Finster thought card poems); Kata Billups (plate 7); The Stephanie

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and Robert Tardell Collection (figure 8); and the Lehigh University Art Galleries/LUAG-Museum Operations. Errors or omissions in credit citations or failure to obtain permission if required by copyright law have been either unavoidable or unintentional. The author and publisher welcome any information that would allow them to correct future reprints. Various collectors have allowed certain images of Finster artworks to be identified as works in their collections: The Girardot/LaBelle Collection (figures 1, 7, 16); The Collection of John F. Turner (figures 9, 14, 15; plate 2); The Stephanie and Robert Tardell Collection (plate 10); Lehigh University Art Galleries/LUAG (figures 12, 13; plate 3); The John and Susan Jerit Collection (plate 1); The Arient Family Collection (plate 13); The John Denton Collection (plates 14, 15). The angel logo facing the epigraph page is a schematic rendition of Finster’s famous Paradise Garden angel (no. 2122), © Thomas E. Scanlin Collection.