Visual Learner: Blinded by the Whirligig

Chapter 7

August 2005 in eastern North Carolina. My aunt told my wife and me to get in the car. She was going to show us something. We were given no hints as to where we were going.

Twenty minutes later, we were in Lucama, NC. I had never heard of Lucama despite it being eight miles from where I was born. It was completely dark, aside from the headlights. I had spent enough of my life in this area to know we were not missing much besides endless miles of tobacco fields. We started on a state highway and ended up on back roads. We rounded the last in a series of unending curves, and the world in front of us lit up in a swirling, kinetic energy of green, yellow and red. My aunt had taken us to Vollis Simpson’s farm.

Vollis Simpson’s farm whirligigs at night

Simpson was an untrained artist, what some from larger cities would call an outsider artist. "Outsider" implies an "inside" into which Simpson is not allowed. It translates to "Look at that hick trying to make art. Isn't that darling? I'll pay your poor, noble soul $50 for your painting and sell it for $5,000 because it has a good story." Simpson was not "trained." All that means is that Simpson did not have $60,000 in student loans so that he could walk around talking about his "practice." He made art. It was good. Do you want an artist statement? "I'm not $60,000 in debt" is a top-notch artist statement.

Simpson made large-scale whirligigs- kinetic sculptures elevated 20+ feet off the ground on large poles. They are composed of various found materials and constructed to move in the wind like a windmill and a weathervane had a baby. It is all the stuff that antique hunters toss to the side to get to the thing they want. Simpson welded together all that material and turned it into art. Some of them are composed of moving parts and rotate on the pole. Several of them are covered in bicycle reflectors. When a person's aunt drives them into the heart of a farming county in the middle of the night, the sky will light up when the headlights hit the reflectors and make you feel like every Close Encounter of the Third Kind dream you had in your life came true. The effect is even more impressive if the wind blows, spinning the whirligigs.

The experience was surreal. My aunt never even said the word "art," but she knew she was giving us an art experience. We could not make out the forms in the dark, which made the reflected light feel like giant fireflies floating, not tethered to any construction. The car slowed down, and we could see silhouettes but nothing that would do the work justice. It did not matter. It was unlike anything in my art brain. I had seen untrained art but not "in the wild ." There was a Bessie Harvey show at the Knoxville Museum of Art when I was in school, and I had seen a handful of other things along the way, but nothing this substantial and on-site.

My aunt explained to us that Simpson owned the farm and worked there. He installed the whirligigs at the curve as a tribute to his daughter, who had died in a car crash at that spot. None of that is true, but that was the legend surrounding it then. It is one more legend unspooled by the internet.

Whirligig Park photo courtesy of Surface 678

Over the years, Simpson's reputation has expanded beyond the county. I saw his work at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, NC, own whirligigs.

The city of Wilson, NC, has embraced his legacy. There is now a Whirligig Park in downtown Wilson, where they have transported and installed many of the pieces that we saw spinning and floating before us that night. You can see a constant live video feed of the park on YouTube.

The park is creating an economy. That is what art does. To paraphrase, comedian Lewis Black, build a big thing, and then people will drive from miles around to say, "Hey, there's that big thing." Apartments now sit across from the park, as does a Simpson museum. There is a taphouse. A small town of about 50,000 people has a legitimate tourist draw that brings people off I-95 to see this art. The ripples from this could be felt for years if everyone stays focused on maintaining the legacy.

What can an artist take from this? It is an "If you build it, they will come" story. The less I know about Simpson, the better. I do not know if his ambition was to be known or respected or if he made whirligigs without expecting anyone to care. I want to think that he felt compelled to make something, and the rest was history. I want this to be true because I want that for myself, not in terms of pride or legacy, but to do my work and not worry about the rest. Ideally, I would make work, and occasionally, someone would show up with a van, pay my noble, ignorant soul for work, and leave. It is too late for that. I peeked behind the curtain.

How many fields of Western study have a more significant disconnect between expectation and reality than the arts? I would assume that the average pre-med undergrad starts school thinking that they will learn to identify what makes people ill and help heal them. No one will say, "Well, that's not what we do here." But art school? That is different. If you enter a contemporary art school solely to learn how to make art, you will be underwater until you learn to swim or wash out.

I started as an art major and bailed after three semesters. I went into geology. At least I understood its purpose. I found it fascinating until I saw how many science labs I had to make up to pursue it as a major. It was overwhelming. In addition to being exhausted, I missed making things. I had no time for even a hobbyist attempt to make art. The desire to make stuff outweighed my disinterest in group critiques. I often tell students that “doing what you love” means “doing what you love 30% of the time and putting up with all of the other distractions associated with it for the other 70%.” To be an artist, I needed to steel myself and plow through critiques that lasted hours and rarely touched on what would make a piece of art more successful than it was in its current state.

A friend once called me “an overeducated folk artist.” It was meant and accepted as a compliment. He also called me the “greatest 2D Design student of all time," which, again, was not intended as a criticism. I am elementary about the way I think about and interact with art. The most positive description I can give you of my critical theory classes is forced 2-hour mental breaks from the studio. At best, we discussed issues of minute wordplay that people come up with to justify having the job of teaching critical theory. I went to school to learn how to make things properly. Tell me the rules of visual design. There are rules. We have been at this for 100,000 years. We have learned how to elicit responses from people and manipulate opinions and emotions. Tell me the rules of materials, so my art does not fall apart. Instead, I found myself in a critique with the professor saying, "Someone explain to me how Chris's paintings connect to Larry Clark's movie, Kids."

Umm…they don-

"Tell me!"

Maybe I should have studied business and made art on the side. I should have been a legitimate folk/untrained artist. The game is not healthy for my soul.

I returned to Nashville twelve years ago. Since then, several artists have moved here, all for different reasons. Some accompanied spouses. Some moved for jobs. All wanted to know "what the scene is like." I think I have told everyone the same thing. No one is an artist here because they believe it will lead somewhere in terms of a career. They are here because they want to be here. They make art here because they are serious about being artists. The two rarely go together well to make a career. A studio visit is probably not coming your way that will change your life. I had what felt like a revolving door of studio visits from out-of-towners for a few years. They were there out of pure curiosity due to Nashville's 'it city” status. The mystique of "it" has been replaced with bachelorette party buses. People are less interested in visiting my studio. My neighbors would not appreciate a party bus driving in for a studio visit. Most, but not all, of the meetings went the same way: conversation couched in subtextual pity from my guests that I live and work here without a tenure-track position as an excuse. Enough of these occurrences have happened that I now have a simple rule regarding studio visits: state the reason for your request to come here. If you do not have one, do not ask. I do not have time for this anymore. If I had a farm, a "no solicitors" sign would be posted at the end of the driveway with a "trespassers shot on sight" sign next to it.

There are artists whose work I respect but whose biographies I respect even more for one decision they made: to stay put. Giorgio Morandi never left Bologna and barely traveled. Prince never wholly moved away from Minneapolis. I do not think people do this to be a big fish in a small pond. I think they do this because they need a constant reminder of where they came from and do not want to spend every day immersed in the game. Being in a scene is a full-time job and antithetical to creating work. Your work is not a call but a response at that point. I have a feeling that if someone showed up at Paisley Park and told Prince they felt sorry for him having to live in Minneapolis instead of LA, he would have had a game-ending response for them.

Some people move here, and their social media profiles list them as living in mysterious hybrid cities like "Brooklyn/Nashville" or "LA/Nashville." Let it go. You are here. Everyone knows it. You can delete the OMNY app from your phone. It no longer works. With this posturing comes a desire to create a level of criticality in the Nashville art scene. "We need what New York has." No, we do not. All of us would be there if that is what we wanted. Relax. I am reminded of Thelma Ritter in Rear Window whenever I hear that. She says, "Intelligence. Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence." Criticality is fine, but it is never what I think it should be.

When I think of criticality, I think of someone saying, "You know what? This is awful. You can't paint." So many people, likely including me, need to hear that. You are awful. Find something else to do, or at least make it and stop trying to crack this art world code with it. Art is a great hobby. Perhaps you would be interested in a hobby. It is like golf. Golf is difficult. You are not going pro, but you can still play after work, drink beer, and have fun. The implication in this desire for criticality is the attempt to build an extension of art school into the real world. Art school is a cocoon, but very few butterflies emerge. You make art in a fantasy world disconnected from reality. Then you graduate. Reality is tough. You want to go back, but you have a terminal degree and did not get a teaching job to keep you in the cocoon. Maybe you can pull that world into the real world? But the real world does not have time for word games and cheap therapy. It needs you to make something worth considering.

1. Visit Vollis Simpson’s Whirligig Park in Wilson, NC. It is located at 301 Goldsboro St. S. There is a Whirligig Festival in the fall. Less than a mile away is Las Chulas restaurant. In the 1950s, the Las Chulas building was a diner. Elvis ate there after he played a show in Wilson. You can also eat at Dick's Hot Dog Stand, which has been in operation for over 100 years.