“As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand.”
I used to teach a literary theory course titled “Camp, Kitsch, and Folklore: The Modern Search for Tradition.” These three terms were treated as modes for art and literature as they exist within culture, especially popular imagination. Susan Sontag’s 1964 “Notes on Camp” was one of the readings.
In it, she defines a “cult” of aficionados, in this case gay men from New York City. In that way, she establishes how a proper understanding of certain concepts relies on considering the sub-group of humanity from which it is issued. Meaning is created, not sub specie aeternitatis but, rather, as a function of the lived historical experience of a particular group.
“A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed, the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”
Perhaps a love of the unnatural derives from being treated as someone unnatural by the larger society. One of its distinctive aspects is that it “converts the serious into the frivolous,” which allows the objects in question to stand outside “the sovereignty of reason.” One might say that this recourse to exaggeration is a way of being able to enjoy manifesting your difference from the mainstream. If you were always treated as different, why not celebrate that difference, make it your own?
Kitsch has come to be allied with Sontag’s influential analysis, in that its objects often serve as a spur for the ironic, in quotation marks, e.g., we know that it is tacky but we kind of love it, sensibility. It reinforces an in-group understanding, an offbeat refinement in a sense, as its practice turns one into one of the cognoscenti, rather than one of the disparaged. As in the case of wine tasting, you do not necessarily have to be a professional intellectual to get there. You just have to develop a palate for what you like. That is the great thing about popular culture. All it seemingly requires is that you enjoy what you enjoy.
The main difference between high art and kitsch is that you do not have to become a snob—only a fan. A common dictionary definition of kitsch is “arts, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic way.” But not everybody’s happy about that. The art critic Clement Greenberg saw kitsch as the enemy of high art, given that it is mass-produced in an uncritical manner and drafts off the sentimental proclivities of a given fully formed cultural tradition. “Kitsch does not analyze culture but repackages and stylizes it. Kitsch reinforces established conventions, appealing to mass tastes and gratifying communal experiences.” It is not only tasteless; it is mindless. The danger is that it dulls us from deeper refinements, the ones that perhaps let us be fully actualized as humans, as well as socially and critically aware.
A plastic placemat bearing a reproduction of Edward Hopper’s famous 1942 painting Nighthawks could stand as an example of a fabrication that drafts off a work of serious art, one which portrays a subtly poignant combination of loneliness and comfort as glimpsed through the long, illuminated window of an all-night diner, sparsely populated by patrons. Overexposure of this image through mass reproduction has trivialized the emotional impact of an acknowledged masterpiece, turning its ambiguous, edgy content into something too easy and sloppily homey, suitable for wrapping around a coffee mug. In a word, kitsch.
Despite its clever co-optation in the world of visual art by pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, the adoration or elevation of kitsch remains mostly verboten within serious poetry. There is general doubt about the possibility of it having credible power to stimulate one’s social consciousness, on account of its use as material being either poorly executed, or ironic and campy à la Sontag, winking at the reader, or unwittingly sentimental and trite in its own right. The idea of linking kitsch to a higher awareness goes against the analytical disparagement of such intellectuals as Theodor Adorno, who, commenting on this purveying of cheap, mass-produced art in Minima Moralia 129, claims that “It is not so much that the culture industry adapts to the reactions of its customers, as that it feigns these latter. It rehearses them, by behaving as if it itself was a customer.” As much as Adorno admired popular film artists such as Charlie Chaplin, he took a dim view of anything plasticine passing itself off as capable of inspiring anything other than hollow, base emotion. There is no true romance to be found at the flea market, only cynical posing.
And then there is Janice N. Harrington’s Yard Show. In this recent book of poetry, she sees crowded assemblages of “kitsch” articles gathered and displayed in many African American Midwestern yards as worthy sites to contemplate, no less in their evocative power and marking of social and racial identity than a Japanese Zen garden. The epigraph of “Yard Show 1,” by John Beardsley, states:
“African American yard shows are powerfully rhetorical spaces where dross is turned into gold, where ordinary materials are sanctified, and where space is consecrated.”
“I should have paid attention—
To flowered urns lined in solemn symmetry
along the drive, to Peter Pan in painted knickerbockers,
to his cement figures cupped to painted lips
calling what query, what answer?
Whose distant ear?”
In this opening stanza, Peter Pan, normally a patron saint of cuteness and naivetë, here stands as a messenger calling out a declaration of vital importance. But calling out to whom? Why, to the poet herself, who seems to need a correction of her previous critical assumptions. It is a startling rhetorical move.
“I should not have dismissed
as déclassé or disavowed
plaster ducks and plaster hens,
a pug, a lion cub, two ponds, three fountains,
all the wrought-iron filigree and sconces,
but should have weighed instead her argument, denial
of restraint or boundary beyond her own.”
The proud and devoted collection of this woman, “her,” of cement and plaster figures to display in her yard are not open to question or criticism by their possessor. The speaker at first means to suggest otherwise but quickly finds out that this lady practices a solid “denial/of restraint or boundary beyond her own.” The poem begins in fact with a retraction of what is to follow: “I should have paid attention.” “I should not have dismissed/as déclassé or disavowed.”
In this way, the poet turns the task of self-enlightenment to herself, then to the reader. We are asked to examine our own assumptions about kitsch.
The poem implicitly also raises the question of whether in her role as collector, the woman herself becomes an artist or, at least, a curator. Some time ago, self-taught artists (who, in an earlier day, were called primitive, or naive) began to be considered worthy in their own right, and the aesthetic of museums broadened to include the works of those such as the African American painterThornton Dial Sr., a man born to sharecroppers in Alabama. What once was “kitsch” is now recognized as genuine art that was overlooked.
What shines forth in Yard Show is how Harrington goes beyond mere fondness for this common spectacle among a class of African Americans. She creates a subversive surface to her poetry by layering in a different context that redeems the yard show as an act of cultural, aesthetic, and personal self-assertion.
- Intersectionality of property rights and identity formation in Black formation.
- The Great Migration and the influence of Southern folkways on African American gardening.
- The impact of the Black Feminine on the American landscape.
- Urban renewal and the erasure of local Black hegemony.
- Black gardening as ideological resistance to neo-colonization and white supremacy.
- See also yard art, vernacular landscape design, dressed yards, yard shows, spirit gardens, material song.
- See—beauty, or what I know
I’ve got a right to.
Is this portion of Yard Show bluntly didactic? Yes, and in this regard, it is not strictly representative of lyric, which ideally lets image rather than rhetoric do the work of instructing and enlightening. Yet Harrington’s work is archeological, one might say, and each poem disinters a stratum of reality that perhaps could not necessarily be achieved by description alone. Rather than a seamless evocation of landscape, Harrington offers a transcription, often commenting on what an earlier verse has just presented.
In “On the Road to the Old Negro Cemetery”:
“Hawks perched on weathered post, a constant scrutiny,”
gets followed closely by:
“A remembered sign in an alley on Main Street—
Don’t let the sun set on you here. I don’t stop.”
Then it is straight back into lyric mode:
“Through a stand of black cherry, shingle oaks, and black hickories,
I walk the crooked gut of Brushy Fork Creek, the dry, empty
border of other unseen graves, their shallow sinking in the earth.”
Precise images fix us in a series of geographical places that hold historical wisdom, as the poet-speaker searches through collective memory, wishing to redeem the forgotten, the dispossessed, those lost to greater public history and who are languishing, in a sense, within a private, alternative history.
“When Identifying Tallgrass” casts the poet as an amateur naturalist who suddenly becomes a historian, speculating on memories that go beyond any immediate tribe to which she belongs and pushing her into a vaster field of recognition and reclamation.
“I set their stalks in a glass vase,
tallgrasses I do not know—spikes, panicles, racemes—
the key is to look
at the structure of their seeds. As always the smallest part
of the pattern shapes the form
that counts for everything. Tetsuya Fujita, in the aftermath
of Hiroshima, studied blasted trees, seared
bones in a schoolyard: the forecast of future disasters.”
She finds in Fujita an affine, a parallel researcher of those lost to violence, another who wishes to give voice to the voiceless. Then, the poem moves to an American family heading north, afraid to stop en route, for fear of wondering “what might be, might be.”
In this way, Janice Harrington affords scope to small stories, in a similar way as she holds up collections of little kitsch objects as powerful signifiers, as if they had been unearthed from a venerated archeological site. By the time one reaches “Yard Show II,” the show has moved to a more organic space, the backyard and garden. The woman has reached a zenith of pride in her creation, not differentiating between the created value of her stone statuettes and the divine flora that springs from the dirt. And, in that unabashed pride, she is made whole.
“Psyche, soul, pneuma—I like container best.
But what contains also restrains.
Free yourself, or you’ll never be free.
And so those hussies, the petaled harlots
she planted everywhere, loud and brazen,
with no stoppin’ sense: that freedom
to be—a prideful thing, all swagger and satisfied.”
As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand. Harrington makes it her job to take us through a yard show that seems to encompass a large portion of the nation. She takes us through place names and people’s names, through The Lincoln Old Folks and Orphan Homes, through Lamar County Training School, through Henry Walker, Lillian Hollis, Annie Allmon, and many others who are known only through a metal plaque at a tourist stop or in the caption of a fading photograph. This suddenly epic yard show, as big as America, swings us to Pembroke Township to speak with black farmers, then detours to the Springfield Race War of August, 1908.
The lyric element in Yard Show, alternating with its more discursive and pedagogical aspect, crops up at any moment in an arresting image, even in a numbered list:
- In Pembroke, a woman walks beside a gravel road, plucking blackberries from roadside canes. Black fingers stained with purple ink, writing what and where they will.
Those purple-stained fingers could belong to anyone, but the indelible ink seems to come from the hand of the author, whose brash pride in her own yard show is written with skill on every page.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
