Picking Through Alabama With Butch Anthony
WORDS Brent Rosen IMAGES Butch Anthony
In the 1970’s, 14-year-old Butch Anthony was exploring the countryside of Seale, Alabama, when he happened upon some bones. Dinosaur bones. Seale is famously fertile fossil territory, but the find was still impressive enough for young Anthony to display. He put the skeleton in what he called The Museum of Wonder, the first of what would be thousands of pieces in Anthony’s five-hundred-square-foot cabin. From then on, love of bones would inspire Anthony’s work.
Anthony did not grow up in an artistic family. “Pinky and Blue Boy were my parents idea of art,” Anthony explained, “they didn’t really understand what I was up to. Still don’t.” But Anthony continued to explore artistic curiosities, mixing fossils, sculptures and crafts. He later attended Auburn, where, naturally, he majored in Anatomy.
Anatomy influences Anthony’s best known work, his superimposition of bones on others’ portraiture. You can think of him as a bizzaro Da Vinci. Anthony is uninterested in anatomical proportion or perfection; instead, Anthony is drawn to what’s going on beneath the human surface. Bones, veins, muscles, the commonality of what’s under the skin. Da Vinci highlighted the perfection of the human form by raising it on a pedestal. Anthony shows us that although many people believe their own perfection is worthy of artistic capture, underneath we are all the same.
Recently, Anthony added another subversive element to his already-renegade version of Southern-Gothic art, adding short, strange phrases to his bone-portraits. “I write down all the weird things I overhear, and then put them on the paintings,” Anthony said. Whether it’s their thought-provoking nature, their outsider rebelliousness, or their subtle memento mori flavoring, Anthony’s bone paintings have become nationally, and even internationally, acclaimed. Galleries in Portland, Oregon, Marfa, Texas, and London, England, regularly display Anthony’s works for sale, and Anthony has a museum show in Akron, Ohio later this year.
But the Museum of Wonder in Seale remains the best place to get the full Anthony. The difference between a hoarder and a collector is the difference between a crazy person and an eccentric: charm, purpose, intentionality. The collection at the Museum of Wonder - skeletons and bones of all kinds, wood working, random bric-a-brac in sufficient form and volume to render the otherwise unremarkable into the sublime - inspires awe because of its purposefulness. The collection may be random, the installation is anything but.
I told a friend about the Museum of Wonder, and she immediately connected Anthony’s museum with the “Cabinets of Wonder” popular in pre-industrial Europe. Cabinets of Wonder, sometimes actual cabinets, other times entire rooms, were proto-museums, private places in private homes where the wealthy could store and display curiosities. The Cabinets served two purposes. First, the collections were meant to show the sophistication and worldliness of the collector. Only a true world traveler could amass Middle Eastern textiles or African sculptures or Jade from the Far East in a world without tracking numbers and international shipping. Second, the Cabinets existed to aid story-telling, the contents acting as visual aids for a somewhat-pretentious seeming game of show-and-tell.
Like most everything Anthony produces, his Museum takes the traditional - in this case the Cabinet of Wonder - and twists it into something new that fits his own artistic vision. Like the Cabinets of old, Anthony’s Museum tells a story, but his is a very Southern story. A story about place, about ancestry, about a connection with land, about taking nothing and turning it into something. If the Museum of Wonder were food, it would be pigs feet, oxtail, greens; food that you don’t even realize is food until someone capable prepares it.
The Museum of Wonder will always be the personal catalogue of one man’s idiosyncrasies, but it also serves to inspire a new generation of artists and makers in the South. The next generation can come to the Museum, or the Doo-Nanny - Anthony’s annual art festival, and realize one needn’t fancy galleries, fawning critics, or formal training to make great art. The Museum also shows the next generation that curiosity, vision, and dedication are what makes a great artist - and you don’t need to be in New York or L.A. to find an audience for your work.
One of Anthony’s works is an antique photograph of a woman’s head and shoulders, under which Anthony has painted a curly-cue stick-figure body. The caption: “Reality doesn’t interest me.” If you take nothing else from Anthony’s work, let it remind you that reality is a state of mind, and only one of many.
