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Black Jack Davy and the Fox

It became clear in my correspondence with Dan that his work in trying to evoke the core of each ballad was sometimes judged harshly.  I asked specifically about his painting of “Black Jack Davy,” but the conversation covered much more.

Black Jack Davy (original sketch) – 2004, Dan Dutton – ink and watercolor

MBM:  Your original quick sketch for “Black Jack Davy” is of a man and woman, but your final painting is two men.  It’s a fascinating take on the ballad, but I don’t want to make too many assumptions about what you were trying to do.  It doesn’t feel political at all, and yet, it’s provocative.  So, what were you trying to do?  Is it something shocking that the ballad does anyway, just reset for a new time and place?  Or can a painting like that do something that a ballad can not?

DD: I’m sure that you will understand that in painting the ballad images my primary goal was not to create something controversial, but how to tone it down to any degree of social acceptability that would allow it to function as art. The idea I had then was that the ballad singer should stay in a non-judgmental, neutral state and allow the statements of the ballad characters to speak for themselves, thus allowing the listener to make up their own mind in a more powerfully interactive way, since they are then compelled to create the characters out of their own experiences, and (alas?) prejudices.

I had enough on my hands trying to explain to the contemporary art world what a ballad was. No one that I met in that world had ever heard of one.

Louisville art collectors Steve Wilson & Laura Lee Brown… [in 2006] presented the Ballads of the Barefoot Mind show in their flagship 21C Museum. Early on, before they committed to the show, Steve & Laura Lee had a contemporary curator… come to their house to see three of the paintings and give his opinion. His opinion was that they weren’t even paintings, that contemporary paintings were about “the materials they were made from” – that the figures in them looked like the back country locals in Kentucky, and that I should take them back to the country and hang them up in a church…  I told him his ideas about painting sounded like something he had read in the 1984 edition of Art Forum… and he fled the scene. Steve and Laura Lee must have been impressed with my chutzpah, or something, and commissioned me to finish the show.

Once the show was hung in the museum atrium you could stand in the middle of the room and see yourself surrounded on all sides by all twelve ballads. A few days after we hung the show, but before the official opening, I arrived at the museum to help get things ready. I was met by the curator… who said, “You cost us $10,000.” How so, I asked. He laughed and said that [a prominent fast food company] had wanted to rent the atrium for their corporate board shindig, but that they insisted that one of the ballad paintings be either covered or removed during the event. 21C refused and they withdrew their deposit… Then he asked me to guess which ballad painting!

So on one wall there were a couple of naked corpses in coffins with briers growing out of their chests, a vision of Hell as an amusement park with an aged harridan’s pointy breasts, a bloodied murdered woman in a shallow grave with her killer and his bloody knife, same-sex lovers having a romantic moment in the flowers, a shot woman turning into a swan and the naked man who gunned her down, a woman in the arms of a naked feral fox-man, and really quite a few naked bodies, many of them male… hard to choose! But no, the offending painting was the fox and his family, eating the goose.

The Fox – 2004, Dan Dutton – oil on canvas, collection of 21C Museum

This was not the first time that “The Fox on the Town-O” had evoked controversy. Years before, I had shown a wooden cut-out of that ballad along with some Grimm’s fairy tales and nursery-rhyme-derived images at a gallery in Cincinnati. On a visit to the gallery while the show was up, the owner told me that a woman had made a complaint about one of my cut-outs, saying that it was too violent and inappropriate for children. Although I hadn’t specified that the art was directed at children, they were all things I had heard when I was a child…  I hadn’t thought any of them were too violent. The Fox was hanging between two other images – on one side there was Hansel & Gretel with the cannibalistic Witch in her candy house, on the other was Punch about to club the screaming baby. Yet it was the fox, seemingly doing what comes naturally, catching a goose to feed his children – THAT was too violent.

It took me awhile to understand.

[French philosopher Gaston] Bachelard writes that animal aggression is more violent in the human imagination because it is imagined as more physically direct and as a source of joy. The tiger leaps onto the neck of its prey with the joy of having teeth and claws.  Little pen knives are a more baroque, and ultimately, distant, weapon – yet still closer to a claw than a gun.

So… werewolf, fox, man with bloody knife, man with gun, (black) man with hammer, gypsy man are threaded together at one level with animality, force, primitive-ness, and maleness… Maybe this is codified in the earliest written story – as the character of Enkidu in Epic of Gilgamesh. As a visual image it appears in the earliest representation of the human form that we know of in art, as either an animal-headed, or masked being, in the cave paintings of the Dordogne. I was very lucky to get to enter three of them while I was working on the ballad project, and be rebuffed by the French archaeologist who took me in, and asked me to test the acoustic theory relating to red dots in the caves (that they were situated at resonant nodes in the cave formation) – [rebuffed] because I chose “Bangum & the Boar” and her theory was that the cave painters had not been violent people!

Black Jack Davy – 2005, Dan Dutton – oil on canvas, collection of 21C Museum

But back to “Black Jack Davy” – at the point when I decided on the image for the large painting I was mapping images in the ballads and plot trajectories, to see how the themes connected. I had recognized by this point that one of the reasons the folk world seemed uneasy about me and what I was doing with the ballads had to do with the unspoken but no doubt recognizable difference in my approach to sexuality. The ballads initially seemed to offer nothing but unrelenting heterosexuality, and I thought I understood why, because they had to pass through generations of singers. One singer might give an inflection or variation to that monopoly, but it would be erased in a generation…

On the other hand, part of me just wanted that song to turn out well for a change – I had enough doom endings by that point, and although I knew that the more historical approach would probably include the hanging, it was the power of the gypsy that intrigued me, and that was a sexual power, and I decided it was high time that I had a ballad turn out the way I thought it should. So I made the couple somewhat like myself (imagined much younger) and a lover that incorporated some of the features that I had found attractive enough to be worth defying social conventions over, because at one level that is what that song is about. “I would rather have a kiss from the gypsy’s lips than all of your gold and money.” I was aware that the ballad had a historical source, and that the gypsy would have been the “other” – the more animalistic, forceful, primitive, untamed, violent uber-male that is still perceived as a threat to proper society…

Yes you sleep on the cold hard ground, but in the arms of a passionate lover nights are still too short. I’ve seen eyebrows raised, but no one has ever said anything negative about that painting to me. Of course art museums are not back country churches.  [Check out a performance of the re-imagined ballad here.]

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