King of a Little Art City

I dropped a bottle of pills a couple weeks ago. Those pink allergy ones. They scattered all over the floor like an exploding star, and I spent what seemed like an eternity picking them up, and I swear to God I got all of them. I even pulled the refrigerator out from the wall, got behind it, etc.  But then today I was sweeping the kitchen and there a couple of them were, in the pile I was getting ready to sweep into the dustpan: two little stupid pink reminders of that dumb experience. I don't know. I keep attaching anything I'm thinking about to Tony Dotson dying, but there you are. A comic slapstick incident (dropped Benadryl bottle) becomes a cosmic experience (two weeks later two small reminders, and then probably in a month another pink reminder and so on.) It's the Chinese water torture method of memory, but also a stupid joke. Which reminds me of Tony's paintings, Tony's personality:

This one always got me. Taking something serious as all get out and landing that thing at the Fisher-Price airport. He's doing race relations as a new set of toys, a new sad joke, and yet the innocence of his intention and gaze and color choice and shapes lets us in on how hard the math is, and that little blue river running through it is everything.  A joke on the chasms between us, a sad comment on maybe just wading through some bullshit and you're good, a political cartoon that also is a satire on political cartoons. Tony did hundreds of these kind of pieces.  Slapstick haikus, with titles that bring everything together.  This one if I remember correctly:  "Race Relations (Fisher-Price Set)." (Go to Tony Dotson Art on Facebook for all kinds of other examples of his serious-punchline genius.)

Tony came to us when we were first pulling together Visionaries + Voices at Essex Studios back in 2003 or so. He owned a bar downtown and had heard about us through a newspaper article I think. He was already into the whole "outsider art" shebang, even trying to claim that title for himself.  He eventually landed on "folk artist," but who cares?  He was an artist who threw himself into the work, and his work was about making fun of the world in a streamlined pop-sophisticated manner. He wanted to simplify, and in the process find the big laugh, the big reason. 

So he walked into the V+V space and his face just lit up. 

It was like he'd found a home after walking the earth for many years. A few of the artists that made V+V their home-joint were there, and he just fit right in automatically, happily grabbing materials, making stuff on the fly. It just came out of him, as did his propensity to collaborate. He made fast friends with Kevin White and other artists there and created whole suites of divine, crazy, silly, beautiful paintings and sculptures. He pushed Bill and me into organizing an art fair on Court Street downtown Cincy (Visionnati, as it was called) for two years -- got us involved in other art fairs across the region. I'll never forget joining him on Court Street and there he was with a bunch of cops and orange cones, closing it down for the weekend.  King of a little art city inside the city right there.  And he was adamant that V+V was his home planet. His excitement and energy and tenderness were real, but it was never gross or sentimental or show-offy.  It was never about anybody's disability; it was about the need to make stuff, to show it, sell it, find other people who did the same thing, rinse and repeat. He was working with all of us to make V+V a real working place, a space for artmaking outside of the artworld but somehow embedded in it. And when all the weirdness happened with V+V (another story), and Bill and I set up Thunder-Sky, Inc., Tony followed us there, helped us out, kept us in the game...

There are people in your life that you can't really thank in the moment of knowing them. It's too embarrassing. Too not what the relationship is about. But now that he's gone all I want to do is thank Tony Dotson. Thank him for his cut-to-the-chase genius, his enthusiasm, his energy that gave all of us more energy. Like those pills I found in the pile, his memory will probably come at me in different silly surprising iterations and accidents, but I'll be so grateful for it.