Show originally opened October 5, 2002:     

HIGH ON LIFE: Transcending Addiction

  

 

High on Life: Transcending Addiction
At the American Visionary Art Museum through Sept. 1, 2003

Raymond Materson knows all about getting high. Back in his cocaine days, his obsessive need for drug money prompted him to try pulling off a parking-lot stickup with a toy gun. The ill-conceived venture landed him in prison, where he started to make two-by-three-inch embroidered pictures out of thread from unraveled socks.

In the end, not only did Ray Materson kick his drug habit, but after his release he became a drug counselor. Besides working with troubled, drug-prone youths, he still makes those tiny pictures, detailing scenes familiar to him such as going before a parole board.

Materson is one of the 100 artists in High on Life: Transcending Addiction, the latest mega-show at the American Visionary Art Museum. Like its subject, this large and obsessive exhibit has an addictive quality. You can easily get hooked in, for instance, by the textile-hooking skills that go into Materson's mini-pictures, which cram up to 1,200 stitches into a square inch. While most of the featured artists only have one or a few works in the show, Materson rightfully gets a gallery to himself. He calls his embroidered autobiographical sub-exhibit "Sins and Needles."

Walking through his show-within-the show during a press preview, the 48-year-old artist retraced his life's journey and described how he felt when he first went behind bars: "I got to prison and I was angry at the world. I was angry at my creator and at the system that sent me here. . . . Then I realized I was at the bottom of a barrel and I turned myself over to God . . . and I was inspired to try this embroidery."

Thinking about happier topics, like his grandmother and his beloved Yankees, Materson at first embroidered cheerful pictures of what he missed about his life on the outside; after his release, he dealt more with the imagery and events that marked his time in prison. The process clearly has been therapeutic for him.

"The embroidery was very time-consuming, and it gave me time to reflect on my past--things that I'd done wrong, yes, but other things I'd done right," he says. "Out of this came a sense of healing. . . . Patience is never my strong suit, but I learned that you could learn patience."

Soon, Materson says, the making of art became a source of comfort. "I don't think I became addicted to it, but it became for me a new life source," he says. "There was a certain obsessive-ness to it. It was addictive, not in a dulling kind of way, but it was more of a freeing up. As I lost myself in the work, my thinking about myself became more clear."

Materson is characteristic of many of the self-taught artists in this show, curated by Tom Patterson: The artist went from an obsessive compulsion to no-less-obsessive artwork that served to document both his addiction and his recovery.

All the drug references you'd expect are here, with heroin, cocaine, hallucinogens, and other drugs featuring prominently in the imagery and accompanying text blocks. And to an extent, the exhibit has a polemical agenda: One text block refers to former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke's attempts to have us consider addiction more as a health problem than a criminal issue. That sentiment is presumably behind the exhibit's inclusion of work that deals with other, more legal cravings, such as those for cigarettes, alcohol, and gambling.

Even with this thesis wafting through the air, though, the exhibit isn't rigidly agenda-driven. Nor is it rigid in its definition of outsider art. In addition to many self-taught artists--some addicts, some not--who often toiled in obscurity far from the gallery mainstream, the exhibit also includes several professional artists and other prominent figures, such as the late writer William Burroughs, who certainly knew something about drugs.

Much of the work in the show's opening gallery makes a point of presenting drug addiction as a particularly nasty business. Mark Henson, whose curriculum vitae includes using a lot of LSD in San Francisco, offers a painting titled "Illusion of Reality," which depicts a man in bed having a literal pipe dream. In the smoke above his bed appear nude women in an idyllic, pastoral setting. But his dream state stands in stark contrast to his actual surroundings: a bedroom table covered with drug paraphernalia; a TV set broadcasting images of a nuclear explosion; and a view through a nearby window of a honky-tonk street scene in which prostitution and violence are the norm.

Similar themes are touched on in different ways elsewhere in the opening gallery. Leroy Almon's paintings "Ghetto" and "The Old Gambler" depict slavish devotion to alcohol and gambling through the simplified realism one often finds in folk art. More overtly nightmarish is William Allen's welded steel sculpture "Boogie Man," a long-limbed monster that may be enough to scare you straight.

Other artists don't go for such obvious horror-show effects, instead making more decorative artwork whose time-consuming craftsmanship surely factored into their getting their minds and bodies off drugs. For "The Garden of Earthly Delights," for instance, artist John Lawson used colored Mardi Gras beads to create an elaborate mosaic that covers a 53-foot wooden bar top from a New Orleans saloon. For "Temptation," he did the same to a piano from an old brothel.

Pieces such as these demonstrate how craft traditions--and the discipline they often demand--helped to spiritually save artists like Ray Materson and John Lawson. It's a point perhaps most compellingly made in Tom Fruin's "Treasure Map," a large quilt made out of small, colored plastic drug bags the artist found on the street.

The final section of the exhibit, however, while meant to be uplifting, comes off as more problematic. If most of the artists seen in earlier phases of the show have put their addictions behind them to go on to more productive lives, the concluding rooms contain work by artists who use drugs in the belief that mind-altering substances help bring out their creative energy.

This case is agreeably made with examples relating to the shamanic use of organic hallucinogens, such as the embroidered designs and plastic beaded bowls of the peyote-consuming Huichol in Mexico. But the argument is much less effective in works such as Maura Holden's painting "Thanatos Wave." In her accompanying text, she uses words like "sacrament" and "self-discovery" to describe how hallucinogenic drugs inspire her. And her painting certainly looks like it was made by somebody who's high. Its circular format contains a riotous, swirling mass of fantasy architecture and creatures, like a poster image you would've found in a late-1960s dorm room. Although the painting is technically competent, like other works in this section of the show, it's not particularly interesting, even as psychedelic kitsch. It may be a head trip into the subconscious, but in a consciously commodified manner. It seems less like Hieronymus Bosch, in other words, and more like plain bosh.