Spiritual American Trash

April 15, 2013

Essayist and critic Bottoms (The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art) profiles a series of self-taught outsider artists who made art not with the hopes of achieving social recognition or commercial gain, but as a means of making sense of their often difficult lives and of appealing to higher spiritual powers. Rather than following an empirical approach to incorporating these mostly rural, American artists into the formal narrative of art history, Bottoms adopts a deeply subjective, semi-fictional mode of writing, weaving together facts and speculation to offer rich portraits of these sometimes inscrutable individuals. Such a project, at once biographical and fanciful, necessarily runs the risk of distortion or condescension. Fortunately, Bottoms makes a sincere attempt to infuse his accounts of such figures as Clarence Schmidt, a man who married his cousin and spent decades building a labyrinthine wood cabin in upstate New York, with empathy and understanding. VERDICT This book will greatly appeal to those seeking an engaging, nonacademic account of the world of outsider art.--Jonathan Patkowski, CUNY Graduate Ctr.

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