04/01/2012
MONDO MOYER:
SELECTED ART FROM THE COLLECTION OF ROBERT P. MOYER
an exhibition at Inter-Section Gallery,
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
featuring works by HOWARD FINSTER and SAM McMILLAN
April 2012
curated by Tom Patterson
Cabinet of Curiosities
The giant, bug-eyed humanoid puppet with his legs splayed out on the front porch immediately tips you off that something unusual is afoot at the two-story, clapboard house near downtown Winston-Salem. Likewise the outsize replica of a human skull perched alongside the front stairs.
Once those objects catch your attention, you’ll also likely notice an assortment of smaller but similarly quirky objects and artifacts displayed on and around the porch--a headless female mannequin, an array of frog figurines, half a dozen miniature Volkswagen-van models, and several articles of thrift-store furniture brightly painted with fanciful images of dinosaurs and flying birds, including a chair that’s suspended from the porch ceiling.
To get a good look at most of these items it’s necessary to follow the front walk up the stairs and onto the porch. If the front door is open, you don’t even have to step inside to notice that there’s much more to see in the front room--a riot of artworks, nicknacks, doodads, precariously stacked books, and funky articles of furniture filling walls, shelves, tabletops, a fireplace hearth and mantel, and much of the floor. Once you’re inside, it quickly becomes apparent that the other rooms are similarly crowded with such diverse contents.
The place is clearly a contemporary manifestation of a European Renaissance phenomenon, the cabinet of curiosities--a collection of objects without clear categorical boundaries. In Germany such a collection was sometimes known as a Wunderkammer or “wonder cabinet.”
It’s also Bob Moyer’s home, a richly associative, multifaceted expression of who he is, where he’s been, what he’s interested in, what he’s discovered, and what he’s created in his years on the stage of the world. As an actor-performer-playwright-poet, Moyer has long maintained a public persona, reflected in the theatre productions, acting-improvisation workshops, and poetry slams with which he’s been associated, as well as his presentations at schools and other institutions. The entertainingly idiosyncratic environment he has created in his home has, up until now, represented his private world. This exhibition brings that world--some of the best, quirkiest, most curious, and/or most unusual components of it, at least--into the public realm.
Moyer’s first collecting focus was books, especially the autographed first editions he began buying about 25 years ago in bookstores he visited while traveling around the country with a small theatre troupe he directed. Since then he has lined several shelves in his well-stocked library with an impressive trove of books signed by well-known and lesser-known authors. But the books aren’t what you notice when you enter Moyer’s house; it’s all the other stuff--the fine-art photographs, fancifully hand-painted thrift-store furniture, contemporary folk-art paintings, collages, drawings, and other works by artists he has met over the years, not to mention all the miscellaneous miniatures, tacky souvenirs, kitsch objects, and personally significant found objects that are everywhere. Be careful not to step on anything or knock anything off onto the floor.
Onstage, on Tour, and in Class
Moyer grew up in Wilmington, Ohio. He was an English major English at Kenyon College in the early 1960s when the theatre bug bit him. It started with an audition that landed him a non-speaking part in a college production of The Visit, the 1956 tragicomedy by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt. From there he went on to act in other plays at Kenyon, where he also gained experience in behind-the-scenes responsibilities such as stage management and lighting design. After graduating from Kenyon in 1966, he went to graduate school at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he eventually earned a master’s degree in directing.
It was in New Orleans that Moyer launched his professional career, working for the renowned improvisational theater troupe Second City. Its founding director Paul Sills directed a company on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, for which Moyer was stage manager, technical director, and understudy. Sills introduced the company to Improvisation for the Theater, the ground-breaking book authored by his mother, Viola Spolin. Noting that he continued to work with Sills and Spolin until their deaths. he says “They taught me what presence was.”
From 1972 to 1983 Moyer taught and worked as a resident theatre artist at Grand Valley State College in Allendale, Michigan. While there he formed a small troupe that remained together through the late 1980s--a period during which he stitched together an income from the troupe’s performances at schools and family theaters along with other theatre-related freelance work. Because he spent much of his time in those years travelling back and forth among several cities--including New York, New Orleans, and Winston-Salem--he lived in his Volkswagen Van.
Moyer began his affiliation with the North Carolina School of the Arts in 1986, when he taught improvisation there during the summer-school session. He eventually became a full-time teacher at the school and director of its high-school theatre program, although he continued to independently pursue his own theatrical work.
Art Collector
It wasn’t until the 1990s that Moyer began more actively exercising hs collector’s instincts. By that time he had settled in Winston-Salem and moved into an apartment spacious enough to accommodate many more possessions than he’d been able to fit into his van. In 1991 he came across a newspaper article about the self-taught visionary artist Howard Finster and was intrigued. Finster was a retired backwoods preacher and jack-of-all-trades who had built a labyrinthine, two-acre junk-sculpture environment in his backyard and created thousands of paintings and other artworks depicting his cultural heroes and the religious visions he reported having. The imagery in his paintings was cartoonish, brightly colored, and typically swimming in a sea of narrative texts in Finster’s distinctively small, upper-case handwriting. Moyer liked what he saw of the art in the published photos, and he noticed that Finster lived in northwest Georgia, not too far off the route he often traveled between Winston-Salem and New Orleans. So, like many other collectors had been doing throughout the 1980s, he made his way to Finster’s backyard “Paradise Garden,” where he met the artist.
By the time Moyer met him, Finster was weakened by ill health and no longer producing relatively large-scale, intricately detailed paintings and sculptures of the kind that had been shown in his museum shows around the world, but he continued to make small, painted-plywood cutouts of animals, American heroes, and other subjects. Moyer bought a number of the latter pieces during several visits to Paradise Garden over what would turn out to be the last 10 years of Finster’s life. He appreciated the unpretentiousness of Finster’s work and the fact that he was so compulsive in making it. He considered these late cutout-plywood pieces reflections of that compulsion. Moyer also met and bought paintings from several members of Finster’s family, including his son Roy Finster and grandson Michael Finster, who had started making art after the elder Finster became famous.
Moyer took special pleasure in his repeated explorations of Paradise Garden--”a cross between a Japanese garden and a West Virginia front yard,” in his words. In building it, Finster claimed to have been motivated by a divine vision. Moyer was struck by the way the profusely decorated, densely crowded garden reflected that vision and the artist’s relentless dedication to it. He felt that the small artworks he bought there continued to possess some of that same visionary power.
Not long after he met Howard Finster, Moyer learned that there was an aging but energetic, self-taught artist producing similarly colorful, whimsical paintings and painted objects in Winston-Salem, within a few blocks of Moyer’s house. Sam McMillan was in his seventies, a former farmworker, machinist, tobacco-warehouse worker, bartender, chauffeur, security guard, groundskeeper, and furniture craftsman. Just a few years before Moyer met him, McMillan had taken an employer’s suggestion that he paint colorful images on the furniture he sometimes salvaged and reconditioned for resale. He started decorating these recycled pieces with fanciful scenes of animals, people and landscapes. The style was loose and rudimentary, almost to the point of being childlike, and the colors were usually bright.. As soon as he began displaying these items on the sidewalk in front of his workshop on Northwest Boulevard, passersby were stopping regularly and purchasing his creations.
When a mutual friend took Moyer to meet McMillan and see his work, Moyer wound up spending two hours with the artist. He bought a table lamp painted in McMillan’s signature style, and he commissioned the artist to paint an old-fashioned metal porch glider. These were the first of many painted objects that Moyer acquired from McMillan.
As with Finster’s work, Moyer appreciates the unpretentiousness, spontaneity, and directness of McMillan’s painted objects. He remembers bringing the painted porch glider home and setting it down in a room that was otherwise empty at the time. “It just glowed,” he remembers. “It was still alive.”
Over the next few years Moyer and McMmillan developed a relationship not only as collector and artist, but also as close friends and occasional traveling companions. In 1994 they quickly attracted a crowd at the annual Outsider Art Fair in New York when they made an entrance wearing jackets, pants, neckties,and hats that McMillan had painted with his characteristic images and designs, including the freehanded dots that earned him the nickname “the Dot Man.”
In addition to the numerous pieces he has collected from Finster and McMillan, Moyer has also acquired a few pieces by other well-known self-taught artists, such as Roger Lee Ivens, better known as Ab the Flagman, and James Harold Jennings.
Not long after Moyer began collecting works by these individuals sometimes referred to as folk or outsider artists, he also started purchasing fine-art photographs from time to time. The first such piece he bought was Lee Friedlander’s Cincinnati 1963, an image of a furniture-store display window that emphasizes the reflections in the glass. When Moyer saw this photograph in a New Orleans gallery he was drawn to it because, in his words, “it speaks of the theatre.” Presumably he refers to the stagelike quality of the display window and its contents, as well as the ghostly glass reflections of the offstage, pedestrian world, which might be considered a metaphorical allusion to the theatre’s mirroring of our own lives.
Since he bought the Friedlander print, Moyer hasn’t exactly become a voracious photography collector, but he has selectively acquired a few other works by well-know modern and contemporary photographers, including Shimon Attie, Helen Leavitt, Edweard Muybridge, Jock Sturges, and Joyce Tenneson.
Another acquisition that Moyer made in the 1990s, when he was starting to collect photographs, was a small drawing by author and artist Edward Gorey, known for his amusingly macabre, self-illustrated books such as The Apoplectic Bicycle, The Gilded Bat, and The Hapless Child. In addition to this original drawing, which Moyer bought at New York’s legendary Gotham Book Mart, he subsequently accumulated a number of signed editions of Gorey’s books and one of his prints.
Moyer has also acquired paintings, drawings, and other works from a number of relatively young, lesser-known artists who live in his adopted hometown and have become his friends, including John Blackburn, Jason Blevins, Garnett Goldman, Jack Hernon, Laura Lashley, Tiffany O’Brien, the late Kelly Petersen, and Mona Wu. Noteworthy among the works he owns by artist friends from other parts of the country are collages by Kolmus Greene (Los Angeles) and Judith Burke (New Orleans).
One of the distinctive aspects of Moyer’s collection as typically displayed in his home is the lack of any sense of hierarchy. There’s no apparent distinction between “high” and “low” art, fine and folk art, or famous artists and not-so-famous ones, and no separation by mediums, except that most of his voluminous library is largely confined to a single, very crowded room. The aim in this show is to present some highlights while preserving something of the overall collection’s identity as a unique cabinet of curiosities, a microcosmic theater of the world as one peripatetic performer likes to see it: Mondo Moyer.
By the way, the giant humanoid puppet on the front porch was created by Nancy Staub, a puppetry artist with whom Moyer formerly worked in New Orleans and Grand Rapids, Michigan. He’s the main character in a puppet play titled The Mysterious Giant, about a monumental statue that comes to life. Made largely of chemically treated cloth strips and painted in pale flesh tones, he’s dressed as if for life in ancient Rome, in a toga and sandals.
He works well in the role of silent sentinel, a formidable presence to greet visitors and stand guard over this distinctive gathering of objects.
END
Tom Patterson, an independent art critic, journalist, and curator, is the author of several books on American visionary art and artists, including St. EOM in the Land of Pasaquan (Jargon Society, 1987) and Howard Finster, Stranger from Another World (Abbeville Press, 1989). He has curated exhibitions at the American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore), Appalachian State University’s Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, the Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle), the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art (Greensboro), the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the Terra Museum of American Art (Chicago). He writes a bimonthly visual-art column for the Winston-Salem Journal and contributes frequently to the British outsider-art magazine Raw Vision.
