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J.B. MURRAY
EAGLE CROSSED THE SUN
CAVIN-MORRIS GALLERY NEW YORK, NEW YORK
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EAGLE CROSSED THE SUN: VISIO
CAVIN-MORRIS
ONARY WORKS BY J.B.
S GALLERY, 2018
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MURRAY
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Eagle Crossed the Sun: Visionary Works by J.B. Murray God is Alive, Magic is Afoot Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers
His vision was large. He was enveloped in the golden light of the sun in his garden, dazzled by the twinkling lights reflected in the rainbow arch of the water he sprayed his potatoes with. The light of the earth was refracted and broken up the way the surface of his well danced when sun hit it. His hands were golden in the honey sun. He knew he was suddenly in the presence of God. Up to this point it was a church vision. A calling. Akin to a conversion vision. But then it progressed. J.B. Murray saw family spirits; his mother and sister pleading for his well-being, asking for him to be called and he was given the gift of sight in a vision of an eagle flying across the sun… The slaves and their descendants put together the lives they needed to live to survive under racist conditions. Using what they kept in their memories to regroup and reinvent, on the ethical and spiritual worldview of African home ground they built an American homeground1 that utilized the ancient concept of moral neutrality based on a cyclical concept of time and space rather than a dichotomy of good vs. evil. Time moves in a circular fashion: we are born, we live, we die and continue to the realm of the ancestors for consultation and then we are reborn. Slavery interrupted this cycle and it had to be put together again in an adaptable way for survival in the Americas. The yard show or plantation complex was still a universe where magic and Holy Spirit guided the moral resonance of mankind. The southern yard show is a metaphorical reference to this moral complex; a tribute to the power of ancestors past and remembrance. People of power moved through southern culture continually and were recognized as such by others, often by whites as well as blacks. To this extent then one could make an argument that, despite the fact that they are only partially Christian, J.B. Murray’s visions are traditional to the African Baptist and conjure folkways of the black South. What actually puts him on the edge of a tangible minority within or without that tradition is that he, with the aid of the Holy Spirit and with the commentary of the familiar of water and his spirit-given gift of far sight made marks in various materials while in trance. We called it art. His neighbor called it his ‘working.’2 Not everyone in the spirit did what J.B. Murray did. Not everyone creates a yardshow or is called to be a culture bearer. It was the way his art commented on his culture that makes him iconoclastic. Because of the visual power of these marks J.B. Murray is accepted as one of the masters of African American Art. To fully appreciate some of the artists in the African-American South we need to understand
1 Grey Gundaker, Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American HomeGround (Charlottesville: University press of Virginia, 1998). Judith McWillie, “Art, Healing and Power in African American Yards”, in Keep Your Head to the Sky, ed. Gundaker; Grey Gundaker and Judith McWillie. 2 Paraphrase from interview with Sara Murray Pinkston by Mary Padgelek in In The Hand of the Holy Spirit: The Visionary Art of J.B. Murray (Mercer University Press: Macon, Georgia 2000).
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the world they live in and how that world ultimately influences their art. To many black people born in the US before World War II the world was alive in different ways than we perceive it to be now. Morality wasn’t always a dichotomy between good and evil. Magic and life and religion were not separate. Conjure was everywhere. The concept of conjure dealt with the spirits and with both working for healing and working for harm or protection from harm. Its roots were creolized from African and European healing and magic.3 Conjure was not always oppositional to the Church either. The Church dealt with the grand spirit; God. But there are other spirits; ancestors on the top tier; trickster spirits and ghosts on lower tiers. The Bible did not summon those spirits though it could be used to control them. Conjure was not part of the Church yet the bible was a strong object of conjure in and of itself. “Jesus is stronger than hoodoo (conjure)”4 said J.B. Murray acknowledging recognition of the existence of both by those words. In essence: hoodoo and the Church are interconnected in the same existential landscape and both have their practical uses in regulating everyday life. There has been a tendency with many writers, with some notable exceptions, to make J.B. Murray such a scion of evangelical Baptist faith that the other real local factors of his life are ignored. In actuality he was a part of the African-American yard show complex. This phenomenon, still very prevalent, created a sacred landscape around a home that provided a symbolic marking off of territory for both fending off unwanted energies and for self-empowerment. Minimal in size as it was, his yard was protected with stone constructions and seemingly random objects carefully placed in strategic places like hundreds of other African-American yards throughout the United States and Caribbean.5 On the outside and the inside of the walls were his sacred writings and drawings. What made him special; what made his life idiosyncratic and iconoclastic despite the post-slavery traditional niche he lived in was that he made art and continued and developed the yard show concept by making his home an nkisi,6 a power-protected hub of spiritual energy that engaged alternate states of consciousness and reflected them back out on the world. And he drew. Unlike many other artists whose careers were vision-inspired there is no evidence that his vision told him to write or draw… His art came from his own need to manifest the huge energy of his ecstatic vision into a physical medium fueled by his message. It is well documented that those who have extreme experiences of altered states of mind come back with a tremendous inner pressure to communicate it to the rest of the world. His artworks were a result of his vision. The ‘callings’ converge. His non-Baptist encounter with spirits merged with his call into his faith, a phenomenon documented many times in the annals of black folk religion in the U.S. The sun enveloped him in glowing radiant golden colors and an eagle, the symbol of far ‘sight’ crossed the sun and became embedded in his cosmos. As stated above his vision revealed ancestors; his mother and sister spoke to God asking for a blessing for him. It also
3 Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California 2003). 4 From transcript of interview with artist by Judith McWillie, Mitchell, GA, 31 May 1986. 5 Grey Gundaker, “Creolization, Nam, Absent Loved Ones, Watchers, and Toys” in Creolization as Cultural Creativity, ed Robert Baron and Ana C. Clara, (University of Mississippi, Jackson 2011). 6 Robert Farris Thompson “The Circle and the Branch: Renascent Kongo-American Art,” in Another Face of the Diamond, ed Judith McWillie and Inverna Lockpez (New York:INTAR Latin American Gallery, 1988).
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revealed the torment of the unsaved; the sinners, the unbaptized. The intensity of it stirred unease in those around him because of his personal zeal and unrelenting prayer. But after a time his message was accepted by his community again and he was even allowed to sometimes sermonize.7 The vision was accepted as his calling to the spirits and to the Holy Spirit. His art became a tool and support for his journey. Only by understanding the social context of a vision along with its formal excellence can one gain perspective on a vision like Murray’s. His culture propelled his art career and yet he was regarded with a certain sense of approbation at first by that very traditional black Church community. Murray had trouble with them but even more trouble with the girlfriend of his son resulting in his short lived incarceration in a hospital for observation, followed by the building of a separate living quarter on the land of his old house where his son now lived. It was this structure he enforced with painted wall panels and objects. Western culture separates Church and non-Church spirits. The yard show complex does not. It is important to return this perspective to how it is actually received by those within the world view who live it every day; an integrated world view that makes it a single religion. And within that context we can see J.B. Murray’s drawings from the most appreciative perspective. A calling may happen to many but the particular impact of J.B. Murrays’ vision was unusual in that it manifested shortly afterword in the huge and complex depth of his written glossolalia and drawings. Shortly after his vision Murray began to write what he felt were divinely inspired words of blessing meant to heal the tormented soul/spirits of the unsaved. To some black people in the South the world was and is inhabited by spirits of both positive and negative forces. The same people are also members of a Church that has creolized and differentiated itself from the mainstream Church by combining an African ethical morality with a Christian one. Magic and religion. It is an Africanized church but not necessarily a church where you can easily pinpoint specific Africanisms. It is more participatory (dance, singing, ecstasy) than Northern or white churches whose emphasis was on Scripture. In this more vernacular worldview magic and ethics have become integrated into the whole living organism. The study of the Pan-African Diaspora is changing. It is probably best to pick a viewpoint that goes beyond retentions and total erasure of Africa and seeing it rather as a process of memory and reinvention. The South is not Africa. Western Society creates the ‘outsider.’ It does everything it can to ensure that the iconoclast is locked out, or locked up or cast out. In particular I am speaking of visionaries and seers, mediators between worlds, people whom in indigenous societies would be given roles of importance even if they were feared or shunned. This includes people who are still seen as vital parts of the cultural life, arbiters of ‘moral neutrality,’ able to perpetuate good or evil depending on the given situation. Other cultures do not create an ‘outside’ no matter how aberrant the behavior. The visionary is a valid and important role in the culture and becomes a moral arbiter. Our concern here is mainly with what happens within African-American Society 7
Padgelek, 2000.
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when one of these charismatic beings steps beyond even the visionary role and puts materials together in such a way for those original visionary purposes that they engage our sensibilities as art. In those cultures these materials are rarely made from a purely aesthetic viewpoint. At the same time aesthetic choices are made every inch of the way. If there are any real links between the Western concept of ‘art brut’ or ‘outsider’ art and say, African-American yard show complex artists it is that the work is rarely if ever art for art’s sake i.e. art about art. It is not about ‘art’ per se. Its original intentionality is always utilitarian on some level (J.B. Murray’s work being no different); it has been made to achieve something on some level ranging from solipsistic to amuletic and/or didactic. In researching or illuminating the work our job becomes the location of that utilitarian intentionality, to find the locus of its truest context. J.B. Murray made his work on several levels; all devoted to the spirits on some level, whether amuletic or didactic. He sought to portray the unsaved spirits blessing them in his calling as an agent tapped by God. He also wrote holy script and handed it out as healing and ‘workings’ to bring other people to salvation. It is interesting to think of how the art history of the West might have been changed had Jean Dubuffet been able to have real exposure to African-American works. In a way Dubuffet’s idea of Art Brut itself was disabled by the times he lived in. He had no context for culturally propelled work. Indeed his collecting method was to strip work of its context and bring it into a new context called Art Brut. It was thus his concept of Art Brut that was anti-cultural, not the work itself. His premises by sheer circumstance became solidly European because at the time of his attempts to formulate the rationale of his collecting proclivities this major aspect of the artworld was not to be examined or even ‘discovered’ in its full context until twenty to forty years later; namely the art brut and self-taught artists of the Americas. It was an art born out of a reinvention of culture in reaction to the brutal holocaust of slavery. The closest Dubuffet got to this was the temporary inclusion of the Haitian artist and Vodou priest Hector Hyppolite, whose presence was uniquely due to the activities of Compagnie de L’Art Brut member Andre Breton in the 40s who had met the artist in Haiti, and who soon withdrew from the group when the collection was to be housed in the United States. Hyppolite’s work was excluded around the same time or shortly after. But even then, even if his work had remained, the world had done little or nothing to understand or contextualize the work of this artist in the matrix of world art. Haitian art was treated as an anomaly, an exotic manifestation connected to tourists who wanted a savage Rousseau and indeed in Haiti Vodou subjects were often gently discouraged as non commercial. Anthropology was just beginning to examine the lives of the plantation culture in the new world and raise questions of post-African retentions and creolization. When Dubuffet carved his art brut mandates into the walls of the modernist cave the presence of African-American artists of the Western Hemisphere was not documented. What few examples there were were mistakenly and wrongfully called ‘folk art.’ There was only that superficial murmuring from Haiti, singlehandedly perpetrated by Breton bringing back
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those six Hyppolite paintings in 1947-8. The central implicit truth of Dubuffet’s concept of art brut is that the maker is isolated in a marvelous vacuum touched not by the art canon’s needs of high culture or the folk roots of tradition. To maintain the Sisyphean impossibility of this concept he had to change it, constantly eliminating and reshaping rules as he went along, and at one point even further obfuscating sources by changing the brand; the work was no longer folk or spiritualist or by the mentally disabled it was now just art brut. Art Brut remained a European phenomenon and therein are the problems we are confronting today. The visionary work of J.B. Murray becomes a key to the discourse. What is decided about his place in world art and in regard to the canons of art brut will reflect on many African-American non-mainstream artists. At the center of this is a key question: if a group of people are considered non-mainstream politically and sociologically by a racist uberculture; forced into outsider status by birth, and still maintain a consistent howbeit traditional lifestyle, what happens to their art in regard to art brut’s demand for non-traditional status. Some would say the key determinant factor would be the word tradition but this carries its own baggage. The European art takes its own connection with its own traditions for granted; its religion, its mores, its materials. Even Dubuffet’s insistence that the work have a bias toward the ‘common man’8 is a social and political stance. It is an ancient one and is as much a part of tradition as is the religion and social standing of the black man in the new world. What is not traditional in either New World or European world is the picking up of a pen or brush or carving tool to express aspects of those worlds. It is an exceptional phenomenon despite its appearance throughout history. In this case it is a utilitarian act enforcing some degree of purpose that has little or nothing to do with the art world. But there was nothing in Dubuffet’s rumination on art brut (through no fault of his own but more of a historical ignorance) to factor in the very complicated world view and moral universe of the African diaspora. So in essence if a white European engages the spirit world for matters of mediation between the dead (ancestors) and the living no one questions it in the art brut world. But if a non-white or non-Western artist receives a vision and confronted ancestors in a shamanistic way no matter how idiosyncratic or individualized the circumstance might be it is called folk or traditional and it is questioned and it is asked to please wait outside. It has come to the point where the arbiters of Art Brut’s gates must decide to expand to allow in the new world or it is in danger or perpetuating the very same evils Dubuffet fought by recognizing Art Brut in the first place. Tokenism is as bad as exclusion in the long run. There is a line drawn in the sand here. Cramming the African-American work into a pre-existing conceptual form by cutting off limbs to make it fit in the bed of art brut is certainly not the answer. It is more important to continue in good faith the elemental work of Dubuffet and expand the borders of the enclosed country of art brut to include visionary art from non-Western or creolized cultures. Spiritualism and contact with Western spirits, ghosts, ancestors, and religious entities seems to be allowed if a Western artist makes the contact. 8 Lucienne Peiry, Art Brut, The Origins of Outsider Art (Flammarion, Paris, 1997) All information on Dubuffet’s journey of structuring Art Brut stem from readings in this book.
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Non-western artists are not. Catholic priests are in. Shamans are out. It would be a shame if the legacy of a master artist like J.B. Murray was dependent on our need for definitions rather than on its own deep creative merits.
Randall Morris, 2013
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Tempera and marker on paper, 24 x 18 inches, 61 x 45.7 cm, JBM 435
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Tempera and marker on paper, 32 x 22 inches, 81.3 x 55.9 cm, JBM 425
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Pen on paper, 8 x 5 inches, 20.3 x 12.7 cm, JBM 697
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Pen and marker on paper, 8.5. x 5.25 inches, 21.6 x 13.3 cm, JBM 522
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Tempera and marker on paper, 24 x 18 inches, 61 x 45.7 cm, JBM 430
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Tempera and marker on paper, 25.5 x 19.75 inches, 64.8 x 50.2 cm, JBM 47
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Tempera, marker, crayon, and ink on paper, 23.75 x 18 inches, 60.3 x 45.7 cm, JBM 431
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Marker on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches, 27.9 x 21.6 cm, JBM 743
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Marker on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches, 27.9 x 21.6 cm, JBM 167
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Ink on paper, 11 x 8.4 inches, 27.9 x 21.3 cm, JBM 48
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Watercolor, ink, and marker on paper, 14 x 10.5 inches, 35.6 x 26.7 cm, JBM 238
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Tempera, marker on paper, 11.75 x 9 inches, 29.8 x 22.9 cm, JBM 67
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Ink and marker on paper, 10.75 x, 8.5 inches, 27.3 x 21.6 cm, JBM 199
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Tempera, crayon, ink, marker on paper, 24 x 18 inches, 61 x 45.7 cm, JBM 446
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c., 1978-1988, Tempera, ink on paper, 8.5 x 5.5 inches, 21.6 x 14 cm, JBM 651C
J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-198 8.5 x 5.5 inches, 21.6
88, Tempera, marker, ink on paper, 6 x 14 cm, JBM 500-1
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Tempra, ink on paper, 8.5 x 5.5 inches, 21.6 x 14 cm, JBM 651A
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Tempera, ink on paper, 8.5 x 5.5 inches, 21.6 x 14 cm, JBM 720
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Tempera, ink on paper, 8.5 x 5.5 inches, 21.6 x 14 cm, JBM 722
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Tempera and crayon on paper, 24 x 18 inches, 61 x 45.7 cm, JBM 443
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Pen on paper, 8.25 x 5.25 inches, 21 x 13.3 cm, JBM 679
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Pen on paper, 8 x 5 inches, 20.3 x 12.7 cm, JBM 695
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J.B. Murray Untitled, c. 1978 - 1988 Ink on paper 22.25 x 2.5 inches 56.5 x 6.4 cm JBM 781
J.B. Murray Untitled, c. 1978 - 1988 Ink on paper 22.5 x 2.5 inches 57.2 x 6.4 cm JBM 780
J.B. Murray Untitled, c. 1978 - 1988 Ink on paper 22.25 x 2.5 inches 56.5 x 6.4 cm JBM 669C
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Watercolor, marker, ink on paper, 22 x 14 inches, 55.9 x 35.6 cm, JBM 734
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J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Tempera and marker o
on cardboard, 14.75 x 20.75 inches, 37.5 x 52.7 cm, JBM 739
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Copyright © 2018 CAVIN-MORRIS GALLERY Cavin-Morris Gallery 210 Eleventh Ave, Ste. 201 New York, NY 10001 t. 212 226 3768 www.cavinmorris.com Catalogue design: Sophie Friedman-Pappas Photography: Jurate Veceraite Essay by Randall Morris
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J.B. MURRAY