#SPORTALDISLEXICARTAPHOBIA- Part One

“A pale glow stole over the Thing; gradually its cloudy folds took shape — an arm 

appeared, then legs, then a body, and last a great sad face looked out of the vapour. Stripped of 

its filmy housings, naked, muscular and comely, the majestic Cardiff Giant loomed above me!”- Mark Twain A Ghost Story 1903

   I know most of you think I never made a dime off my art and am so obscure as to never get invited to speak on the subject of my work in polite society. For the most part you are correct. But once in a blue moon I do get a gig. One such occasion was an invite to lecture at my alma mater, The San Francisco Art Institute. I had spent a small fortune self-publishing a monograph on a couple of years worth of work and after sending it to everyone I knew in the art world and academia (with little or no response) Tony Labat and S.F.A.I. were kind enough to take pity on me and extend an invite to do a public lecture. Tony told me it needn’t be scholarly nor academic but the front office recommended I come up with something intellectually catchy for the lecture’s title. Hence Sportaldislexicartaphobia- the fear of visual art.

    Unlike fruit, I actually have no fear of art, but the first “real” work of art I spied was a little traumatic. So I used this experience of shock and fear to anchor my trajectory into obscurity and inspire subsequent lecture. 

    

    Let me go back again into a little Catskill history. The “giant” that Mark Twain refers to in the quote from A Ghost Story is actually a sculpture or more accurately, the ghost of one; the first piece of original art I ever saw. It is also “one of the most famous hoaxes in American history”— The Cardiff Giant. My earliest experience at a museum was as a ten year old, in The Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, viewing the Cardiff Giant. This also included a recitation of the story by my grandfather. A docent couldn’t have done it better. 

     Cardiff, New York is a little hamlet off Rt. 11A  just south of Syracuse, around where Cassandra Warner grew up— maybe not Catskills proper—but close enough. It’s farm county and in 1869, just after the Civil War, there wasn’t much going on in Cardiff. But, what was present was an intense religiosity left over from the revivalism of the the Burned Over District in the 1830’s. Google it. I don’t have time to go into that just yet. Suffice it to say many spirited discussions took place at church socials and town meetings regarding religion. Most residents were of the evangelical Christian variety, but a few members of the town took an opposing view. One such contrarian was a tobacconist named George Hull. Hull was an atheist. One evening at a Methodist “meeting” Hull got into a heated argument with a congregant over a particular Biblical passage, Genesis 6:4:          

“Then the Lord said, "My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.”

    Why an atheist was at a Methodist meeting is anyone’s guess. Probably it was out of boredom. Like Carlo McCormick says in the upcoming documentary by Roderick Angle, MIKE OSTERHOUT AND THE CHURCH OF THE LITTLE GREEN MAN, premiering at the Woodstock Film Festival sometime in October, “Boredom is the reason why most things get started…” Too much solipsism? Naw. The CLGM wants to stay small and resist boredom. Don’t tell anybody about it. Shush. But staying small and un-boring is not the goal of most other religions. 

    One of the world’s fastest growing “major” religions is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The big, old, established Christian franchises like Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism are all on the down slide. Methodist churches can be picked up for a song. I got one! Judaism is a not looking for members  (synagogues are also going cheap) and Islam maintains steady (if not a bit fanatical) membership. Mormonism or the L.D.S. church, on the other hand, was started in America, the petri dish of capitalism. In 1830, just down the road in Palmyra, NY, Mormonism was birthed by a sketchy treasure hunter named Joseph Smith. Smith’s outlandish Book of Mormon has as much (or more) entertaining lunacy in it as does the Bible. They’ve made Broadway shows out of both. I don’t know why but Mormonism was, and still is, a big hit. The Methodists were not immune to the Mormon tentacle in the late 1860’s. Anyhow, George Hull wanted to teach the churchy types a lesson or two in blind faith and Seeds of Anak fundamentalism. He’d expose their crazy gullibility with art. The first step was to get some supplies and make a plan—conceptual art at its core.

     George Hull had a massive block of gypsum shipped from Iowa to Chicago, telling the quarry it was for a statue of Abraham Lincoln. Then, in Chicago he hired a German stone cutter by the name of Edward Burghardt to fabricate a ten foot long, anatomically correct man with his left hand behind his back and his right hand just above the penis…no Abraham Lincoln. The torso a bit twisted and the stone difficult to work with, the giant ended up in quiet repose, calm and ready for his fifteen minutes of fame. He looked like he’d been waiting all along. Hull either instructed that the beard and hair have curls and classical Roman features or Burghardt took it upon himself. In either case, if “giants” walked the earth in antiquity they were definitely white men. It was no David but still not bad for an out of work immigrant mason. 

     After sufficiently “distressing” the sculpture to look like the ancient man had “petrified,” Hull paid to have the final product crated up, put on a rail car and sent to his cousin Bill Newell who lived on an isolated farm in Cardiff, NY. There cousin Bill buried it behind his farmhouse and awaited further instructions…….to be continued.