Why I Am Enjoying Medium Right Now
This takes a bit of explanation. Bear with me.
I once went to look at something at the Museum of Modern Art with my friend, Paul Whiting, who is an artist, and when we came out of the museum he stopped to talk to Ionel Talpazan who was selling his drawings on the street outside the museum. Ionel was standing next to a collection of works on paper and some canvases that he was selling for cash. We each bought a drawing that day, and Paul later went to Ionel’s apartment in Harlem and bought some things from him. Years later, we both went to the American Primitive Gallery when Talpazan was having a show there, and Paul bought another drawing that he gave me as a wedding present.
Ionel Talpazan was an exciting artist. He died this past year (that’s his obituary in the NYT linked above). William Grimes calls him an “outsider artist,” meaning that he had no formal training and did most of his work outside of any artistic community, movement, or institution. Having talked to him, I think he might have been a paranoid schizophrenic. My pop psychology may well be entirely wrong, and I don’t even know what the term means, really, though I have had plenty of contact with people who carried that diagnosis. Is Talpazan’s work art brut? I don’t really think it matters. The work stands on its own.
Years earlier, Paul had introduced me to the work of Bill Traylor. If you are unfamiliar with him, you can read about Bill Traylor on Wikipedia. I can’t say much about Bill Traylor, because so many other white people have said too much already. Like with Kara Walker, I’m most interested in what black people have to say about Traylor’s art.
What I will say is that I like his work a lot. That “terrapin” drawing below is one of my favorite images. I have used it as a background on my desktop for years.
The other thing about Bill Traylor is that he didn’t start drawing a lot until he was 85 years old. I often say, “Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was 90,” which, according to Wikipedia, is not true. We should, as a society, replace that common aphorism with, “Bill Traylor didn’t start drawing until 85.” He was seven years older than Grandma Moses when he started, and I like his art better, though I’m a fan of Grandma Moses also.
What Does This Have to Do With Medium?
The beauty of “outsider art” is that it is less packaged and more direct. I don’t discount the fact that artists can take the packaging, commodification, and commercialization of their art and turn it on its ear in order to achieve meaningful expression, but it is hard. Since I have known him from childhood, I can say with conviction that Paul Whiting’s art has more integrity than most things in my life. I could say the same about some other artists I know, like Ellen Driscoll, but I don’t know that many artists, and I am suspicious of things that are set up in galleries, shows, and museums because they are usually put there by people who are on the make.
The same is true with writing. When it comes to publishing, Tim Barrus is more right than wrong, and our New Media overlords are just like Steely Dan’s King John.
The Internet, however, can remove the middle man. We can see the outsiders at work.
So, in short, the beauty of Medium is that we can read here what can’t be found anywhere else. We can get the straight sauce, and what a marvel that is.
Just in the last few days I have found Mohan’s
Emjay Em’s
That’s a strange list, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t it be? It’s an odd conglomeration of what I fell upon that interested me. It is just a small sample of what I have recently found here. I don’t read much. Really. I don’t read books, magazine, or newspapers anymore. I’m not sure why I don’t, but I just read Medium. It is enough. I haven’t read a short story in a decade, but now I read Timothy J. O'Neill’s dispatches from Marshville. I enjoy them, and I never would have found them outside of Medium.
I spoke to Ionel Talpazan when he was alive, but my life was so different from his, I might as well been one of his aliens. Likewise, Bill Traylor’s life was so different from mine that I wouldn’t dare to comment on it. The gulf of experience is so great that I’m not sure I have the capacity to understand Traylor’s art, really, but I can look at it and enjoy his art on my own, limited, terms.
All art is a framed experience, but it is the artist themself that should be the one to do the framing. The Medium platform may pollute the water a bit, but for now, you can find great things coming straight from the mouths of writers. If the outsiders are here, and I think some of them are, then that’s where I want to be.