April 18, 2005
Eliphante
Eliphante, in Cornville, Arizona, is Michael and Leda Kahn’s home. It’s also an amazing piece of art – or, as the Kahns put it, an “art form”. The highly idiosyncratic compound, which sits on three acres along a river bank includes five separate major structures: Eliphante, itself, the Kahn’s living quarters; Pipe Dream, a gallery; Kiva, a meditation space; a wading pond; sculpture garden; and a bath house – all kludged together over many years from found objects, adobe, wood, fero-cement, and stones. The crude biomorphic shapes, baked under the sun, and bent by wind, rain, and gravity are Surreal. Max Ernst’s description of the Sedona landscape as the closest to “inner vision” originally inspired the move. And every detail of Eliphante is so faithful to that original inspiration, it is impossible to describe it without resorting to the most out-of-this-world comparisons between it and the knotted, snaggle-toothed trees and shaggy bushes that surround it. The stained glass windows of Eliphante and Pipe Dream, Frankensteined together from car windows and colored glass, especially play on the semi-anthropoid hunched and bent shapes that haunt the local landscape. It is, without a doubt, the kind of monument that is only possible as a labor of love and obsession, willfully and happily unaware of the kinds of market forces that otherwise rule the world. There is probably no better example of what has come to be called "outsider" art. By extreme contrast, on the other hand, there is something vaguely uncomfortable about the likes of consummate, informed insiders David Bowie and Brian Eno’s use of “outsider” art as a sales pitch, even for an album, The Outsider, that went practically unnoticed – especially so because these guys were once superfreaks. In all fairness, the interview is almost ten years old. Who knows how often their respective raps have changed since? Nevertheless, the interview could easily be an episode in Daniel Clowes’ spoof of art school, Art School Confidential (Bowie’s friendship with the artist Tony Oursler only adds a certain authenticity to his art prattle). The three way conversation really underscores some of the major awkwardness about the way art and pop culture address such phenomena as meaningfulness in art. Bowie and Eno’s rehearsed gushing praise of insane art and Henry Darger (a copy of Raw Vision, a magazine on outsider art, was brought along as a handy prop) is unabashedly comical. Neither Bowie nor Eno are foolish enough to fully claim for themselves the particular psychic mind frame necessary to the true outsider. These are the most savvy sophisticates. They know full well they can only ape at being fools and marvel at the exotic possibility of a world other than their own. Their predictable advocacy of the importance of a sense of “childlikeness in the studio”, and a “sense of play” necessary for creativity which starts the interview off is only a taste of what is to follow. The most revealing parts of the interview, actually, have more to do with the dynamics of Bowie and Eno’s relationship than anything else. The language is so incredibly Art School Confidential it is hard not to laugh. The most improbable boasts are made, especially by Bowie, who seems constantly to want to get the upper hand. Bowie’s work is “intuitive” while Eno’s is “concept” driven. According to Bowie, Eno “always knew why” he was “deconstructing things”, while he “just enjoyed cutting everything up.” “What Brian is very good at is taking things from the popular and putting them into a fine-art area”, Bowie informs us, whereas the self-aggrandizing pop icon instead tends to “nick from the fine arts and demean them down to street culture”. Where they “pass each other”, Bowie neatly explains, is the “pivotal point” where they work "best". The two debate whether their art is “linear” or “unstructured”, discuss the pitfalls of being “Apollonian” as apposed to favoring “chaos” and “fragmentation”. And, like most art school artists, they repeatedly voice their grave concern over being confused for “fine artists”. “If we were proper fine artists,” Eno says, quite desperate to make his point, “we would be terribly concerned about which school we belonged to. The advantage the popular arts have is that they are not ideologically proud.” These self-tortured duels for some supposedly “correct” position would be stultifying if they weren’t so funny. But, alas, there is something sad and empty about this discourse. Conspicuously absent from all their rhetoric on the piety of outsiderness is any real sense of the experience derived from an art form like Eliphante.