Artforum

By Joe Bucciero

THE CLOSING DECADES of the nineteenth century experienced a crisis of certainty. New techniques and technologies had promised untold capacities for the verification of facts and images, and yet these new developments, such as photography, often failed their evidentiary tasks. As many discovered, photos could be faked, miscaptioned, lost, destroyed; veracity remained a matter of trust more than of objective record. Perhaps fittingly, these decades also witnessed the birth of artist Joseph E. Yoakum: likely in 1891; likely in Ash Grove, Missouri; likely to parents of French, African American, and Cherokee ancestry. Yoakum traveled extensively throughout his life—first as a youth member of the Buffalo Bill and Ringling Bros. troupes, later as a soldier and rail worker. Sometimes, along the way, he proffered alternate dates or places of birth; sometimes he distanced himself from Blackness or claimed Navajo heritage instead of Cherokee (as an in-joke, he pronounced it “Nava-Joe”). So, in the early 1960s, when the then-septuagenarian artist inaugurated a series of some two thousand drawings, it made sense that these pictures—renderings of sites he had visited, he said, plus the occasional portrait—would, like his personal narrative, throw certainty into limbo.

To art historian Whitney Halstead, writing in 1972, Yoakum’s landscapes represented “memories of places he had seen blended imperceptibly with fantasy.” Halstead anchored a cohort of Chicago-based writers and Imagist artists who befriended Yoakum after the latter’s debut exhibition in 1967 and went on to evangelize about his work. The elder artist had settled on the city’s South Side earlier in the decade and, with limited art experience, had begun drawing every day. With a focused formal tool kit—including what Philip Hanson catalogued in 1969 as “outlined sinew form[s],” “converging lines,” and “overlapping tree forms”—Yoakum devised a loose but consistent pictorial idiom. Woozy rocks, at once flat and textured like geological cross sections, press against the picture plane; uniform evergreens cluster between them, receding in dissonant perspective. Often, water flows from the center (or the stones deliquesce). Sometimes a bridge, train, or cabin indexes human presence (rarely, a single person or animal appears). Absent realism’s truth effects, the landscapes instead bear titular stamps of certification. In 1972, the year he died, Yoakum’s art grew even more abstract; still, he chose documentary titles for it, such as The Attraction of All Wanders Which Is Located in Central Australia I Have Seen Them Twice My Self.

Yet his pictures courted doubt. Regarding the undated Prairie Mounds in Western Iowa on Chicago Milwauke and St Paul R.Y., the Iowa-raised Halstead commented that his state lacked the steep peaks Yoakum depicted. “Well,” the artist replied, “that was just because you never looked.” The comprehensive exhibition “Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw,” organized by Esther Adler, Édouard Kopp, and Mark Pascale at the Art Institute of Chicago, presents more than one hundred drawings, workbooks, and pieces of ephemera that together testify to the artist’s idiosyncratic ways of looking. Although he based the images on places he had visited, Yoakum bolstered his recollections with cultural iconography, substrates of which—postcards, magazines—are on display in the show. But mass imagery had a greater, if indirect, effect on Yoakum, beyond visual reference: It also modeled methods of authority. To demonstrate the truth and singularity of his vision, the artist developed a proprietary system of reproduction and distribution, what he called “copyright.” Especially after 1967, as demand for his drawings increased, Yoakum drafted on carbon paper to produce multiples of certain designs. Quasi-interchangeable labels—“re coppy,” “patron” (pattern), “modle”—identified uncolored templates that Yoakum usually retained to trace over. Yet the “copies” he made to sell possessed original traits, as he added soft, semi-realistic color to each in pencil or pastel and tailored the lines in pen. He dated many works either in pen or with a stamp, sometimes appending subsequent dates to indicate modifications to a piece’s composition or availability. Shrewd insofar as they endowed fungible items with continuous uniqueness, the amendments also frame the viewing experience, encouraging revisitation. If something seems off, it might just be that you never looked; if so, Yoakum suggests, here’s another chance.

Incorporating conditions of production and circulation into his work, Yoakum might be thought to have mirrored contemporary tendencies in Conceptual art and Pop (his portraits of cultural icons fertilize connections to the latter). But if his medium was likewise ideas, those ideas appear less structural than personal, less material than metaphysical. Yoakum described his drawing process as a “spiritual unfoldment,” adopting the term from Christian Science. “After I draw them,” he said, “I have a spiritual remembrance and I know what is pictured.” Coupled with the assured lines and geographic range of his landscapes, his esoteric proclamation has summoned, for many observers, the visionary aspect of much so-called outsider art, where correspondences between referent and image are often said to matter less than the artist’s situation. But correspondence mattered to Yoakum. Formally generic, his art is historically specific: Note the various illustrated World War I munitions and the precise dates added to events, such as cyclones marked 1903 and 1920. These details, inscribed upon given objects or within Yoakum’s elaborate titles, affirm the reality of his experiences; even more, they activate them as representation. And, while aspects of his past, like the war, were no doubt troubling, Yoakum’s act of depiction seems to serve him less as a traumatic repetition (à la Surrealism, to which the Imagists were drawn) than a rapturous reanimation. His drawings evoke what Frances Yates called mnemonic loci and what Halstead, in possible reference to Walter Benjamin, termed memory images. Benjamin conceived such images to interpolate past into present in a flash, like lightning, followed by the thunder of text: “Actualization,” he wrote, “not reflection.”