"Imperfect" Art
A principal distinction that I and the artists I spoke to interrogate is that between “high” and “low” art, along with the closely related distinction between “fine” or “insider” and “folk” or “outsider” art. In his book, The Mask of Art, film scholar Clyde Taylor evokes the work of filmmaker Julio Garcia Espinosa to highlight some of the major preconceptions surrounding “fine” art produced by or contained in some major institutional center. Taylor and Espinosa point to the construction of art as “an isolated, impartial, uncommitted activity, as produced by individuals regarded as special and different, as an activity carrying its own, peculiar cognitive agency” as a defining characteristic of “fine” or “high” art. Given the apolitical expectations of such “impartial, uncommitted activity,” along with the focus on talented, isolated individuals, fine art (per Taylor and Espinosa’s understanding) often excludes radical understandings of race, gender, sex, class, and community in favor of a conservatism that champions individualism and technical skill above all else. This characterization of “fine” art thus, by negation, establishes the elements of supposedly “low” art—created by communities or with communities in mind, not necessarily focused on technical skill (or at least the technical skill taught by academic institutions). In place of “low,” Taylor and Espinosa use the ironic label of “imperfect” to identify and propose art as a communal and social activity which foregrounds the “receiving audience/population,” necessarily appropriating (and occasionally including) the aesthetics of “popular art” like kitsch paintings, Hollywood movies, or Internet culture. Moreover, much like how “fine” art embodies the ideology of those in power, so too does “imperfect” art carry the potential to represent people and communities outside of the perfect norms of the “master narrative” which controls “the interpretation of meaning.” Radical depictions of race, gender, sexuality, and class organizing are not only more likely to appear in “imperfect” art, the very status of this art as “imperfect” or “outsider” allows for such depictions, by definition.
Appalachia, as a region, embodies this cultural notion of “imperfect.” As I explain in "Appalachia," perceptions of the region on national, media, and ideological levels cast the mountains and the people within as inherently backwards and culturally worthless outside of their potential for capitalist resource extraction. Taylor explains that “all cultural production outside of Occidental culture and mainstream Western popular culture is ‘imperfect,’” meaning that the art coming out of Appalachia, especially out of marginalized queer networks in Appalachia, similarly represents this imperfection and the representative/political capacities that imperfection holds. Moreover, the art emerging from queer Appalachians not only represent “imperfect” modes of art, much of the art that they are making calls into question the very distinctions of “high” and “low” art, blurring the lines between the two or discarding the distinction entirely. This intentional or unintentional shattering of the binary of “high or “low,” the “resistance to aestheticization” that Taylor describes, opens new potentials for Appalachian art on a regional and national level.