Comment on this story What is Art, Part II

These local creators value expression over acceptance

by Brian Conley and Mike Gibson

“What is art?”

Metro Pulse associate publisher John Wright tells the story of an art theory class he took at UT in which a student’s entire grade was determined by the answer he or she gave to that age-old question. During the course of the semester, the teacher lectured, assigned readings and held open discussions on the subject, all in an attempt to build a framework for the students to give an informed answer. In the end, John felt the only honest response to the question was that: “All that art requires is an artist declaring it so.”

When asked by the teacher to explain, John responded: “The question was not: ‘What is good art?’ or ‘What is bad art?’ The question was: ‘What is art?’ While one may argue that a certain piece of art is either good or bad, one cannot honestly dispute that someone created it. And if that someone deems it art, then that’s what it is.”

So what grade did he get?

“I got a ‘B’,” John grimaces. “It seems my answer was not entirely original.”

Original or not, John’s words ring true. And they speak directly to the artists featured in the following profiles. These are artists who work on the fringes of traditional concepts of method and presentation, or who sometimes dispense with such concepts altogether.

Their work may not strike you as palatable—it may be too raw or too ugly or too discomfiting—or it may strike you as beautiful, but in ways that flout standard notions of beauty. But your reaction isn’t the point, because theirs is art that doesn’t exist for the sake of someone else’s pleasure or peace of mind. It exists for its own sake.

Whether their methods are loud and bold or subtly subversive, all of these creators consider what they do to be inexorable, a matter of natural imperative. “To the real artist, there is no good art or bad art,” says local painter Ali Akhbar, echoing the same theme our associate publisher expressed in class many years before.

“Good and bad is irrelevant. To the real artist, there is only Art.”

A Tale of Two Chrises: The Man and The Artist

If Dickens were to have written a novel about Christopher Scum, it might well have begun with the sentence: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.” And that would suit the protagonist just fine.

As the war in Vietnam raged, Chris Andrews was born in the Dayton, Ohio, suburb of Kettering. Today, Christopher Scum, a stark, brooding, behemoth of a man, with a gothic tattoo of the word SCUM emblazoned on the back of his neck, haunts the streets and back alleys of Knoxville.

When Andrews was 7, he moved with his family to help run their farm in Adams County, Ohio, where, he says, his stepfather would often beat him mercilessly. Years later, Christopher Scum would write a song about those beatings, called “1978”:

“Everyone says he’s changed.
I see it and it’s just great,
But I’d like to meet him
At my size now in 1978.”

Chris Andrews wrote his first song at 9, the same year Christopher Scum took his first drink. Today, while admitting that alcohol has been the “main monster” in his life, Chris states defiantly: “I’m not in recovery. I just don’t drink anymore.”

In seventh grade, Chris Andrews wrote a short story about an “old, drunken bum who died on a park bench a couple of miles from my home.” His teacher liked it so much that she entered it in a countywide competition, where it won first place.

At 13, Chris began playing bass guitar. Today, Christopher Scum practices guitar at least 90 minutes every night, playing in the dark so he can “feel” the instrument, in the belief that such discipline will make him a better player.

When Chris Andrews was 15, he won a bronze medal in Tae Kwon Do at the Junior Olympics in Jacksonville, Fla. Shortly thereafter, Christopher Scum ran away from home, eventually landing at Flora Green’s house in South Knoxville. Flora is Chris’ great aunt, and he is the closest thing she has to a son.

Eventually, Chris’ drinking drove him out of the house and into female-only Massey Hall on UT campus, where he lived with his girlfriend. But that didn’t last either. Chris’ binge drinking was such that he often blacked out and ended up in jail, or worse. Eventually, he landed at the Hippie House, a legendary den of decadence and debauchery located on the east side of Fort Sanders.

Although he only lived in the Hippie House a few months, Chris’ antics there are still spoken of reverently by even the most hardcore profligates of the day. For his part, Chris claims not to remember much from his time there, although he still suffers physical ramifications from the “second time I jumped off the roof, falling 30 feet to the ground. I cracked two vertebrae and broke my collarbone and spent over a week in the hospital.”

The extended stay caused Chris to suffer severe withdrawals from “cocaine and tequila.”

“I was DT’ing so bad that I began seeing cockroaches on my aunt’s face, watching TV shows that weren’t on and talking to people who weren’t there,” he remembers.

Perhaps the most telling anecdote from those days is that, upon hearing of Chris’ departure from the Hippie House, its owner commissioned a Catholic priest to perform an exorcism on it. Christopher Scum had left the words “Attaboy Enjoy” scrawled in his own blood as a devilish farewell to his landlord.

“I’m not proud of that,” Chris says now, “but it’s a fact. That’s how wild we were. I was so fucked up that I’d do anything for drugs or whiskey. I remember that I once carved the words: ‘JUNKIE: DON’T PAWN’ with a knife into the back of my guitar so that the pawnshops wouldn’t let me pawn it for dope money. Then, one night, when I was getting real itchy, I even tried to take my girlfriend’s fingernail polish and paint over it so I could pawn it. But it didn’t work.”

“Man, I am so glad those days are over,” says Christopher Scum, who, in part, credits his wife, Rene, for his new life as a sober man. He also credits his mother, his Aunt Flo, and a book entitled Rational Recovery by Jack Trimpy, saying that it made more sense to him than other methods.

“I tried AA and the 12-step programs, but sitting around with a bunch of alcoholics talking about our problems all the time just didn’t get it for me,” he says. “I’ve just found it easier to stay sober when I hang out with people I share passions with, instead of problems.”

These days, Christopher Scum, the artist, is pursuing a number of ambitious musical and literary projects. His band, Filthy Crime, which consists of Mikey Rodgers on drums, Steven Crime on bass, and Scum on guitar and vocals, recently packed the house at the Pilot Light, and Scum’s new solo CD, Invisible Tears, has been well received. A mixture of punk and country sounds, Invisible Tears has been described by one critic as “a jaw-dropping mélange of insanity that sounds something like Social Distortion’s Mike Ness with a serious head injury or Hank Williams with a really harsh hangover.”

When asked how he would describe his own music, Scum says without so much as a hint of irony: “It’s scum music. Like me, it’s from the bottom of the barrel, which is where I’ve always found the truth.”

Along with his CD and live shows, Scum publishes GRUMPUS, which is half gutter poetry in the tradition of Bukowski, and half rock ’n’ roll fanzine.

Admittedly rough-edged, Scum is unapologetic about his writing style. “Hey, man. I lay it out there and people can either love it or hate it. Sure, I got kicked out of high school, and I can’t spell worth a damn, but at least I’m doing what I love to do and being honest about the things that I see.”

Even so, Scum admits to being sensitive to criticism.

“I started painting when I was 13. Then, when I lived at the Hippie House, three of the guys came up to my room and teased me about some of my paintings. Not only did I tear those up right there in front of them, I drove out to my aunt’s house, got all of my paintings, poured liquor all over them and set them on fire.”

When asked if he regrets doing that, Scum is reflective:

“Yeah, but I regret a lot of things. Nowadays I just try to do the best I can.”

The Colored Man

Most artists rue the relative cultural isolation of a town like Knoxville as compared to, say, the bigness of Chicago or New York City. But to painter, illustrator, and multi-media artist Ali Akhbar, the unsullied remoteness of his adopted city is a plus. “In Knoxville, you don’t have so many influences,” says Akhbar, seated in the tiny apartment he keeps off Sutherland Avenue, a bifurcated hovel that fairly teems with the flotsam of his artistic muse.

“You go to New York, and you get caught up in this movement or that movement. Next thing you know it, you’re doing somebody else’s art.”

That’s never been a problem for the irrepressible Akhbar, whose digs speak to the cluttered luxuriance of his imagination. Though his phosphorescently colorful paintings sometimes draw comparisons to the likes of Picasso and Matisse, his Afro-centric themes and singular sense of composition mark the works as distinctly his own.

“Some people say my early paintings look like Matisse,” Akhbar says. “I say, ‘No, I just go to the same place he did. I go to the land of Art, and I pick from the same trees.’”

A modestly proportioned African-American gentleman with a slightly awkward, belly-first posture, Akhbar is a longtime regular on the local music scene; he’s the boisterous, hyperanimated little guy whose joyous exclamations and uninhibited flailings are often a center of attention at performances by Todd Steed and R.B. Morris.

In quieter moments, Akhbar talks much like he paints, his speech a mixture of plain-spoken earthiness and elegant mysticism. That dichotomy is reflected in the nickname he’s given his own artistic method—”Southern Zen,” reflective of both simple Southern roots as well as his more worldly, metaphysical leanings.

Born in Rock Hill, S.C., Akhbar traces his aptitude for visual creation back to grade school art class. “We had those big, thick Crayola crayons, like big thick candy bars,” he remembers. “Those colors were absorbed in my senses, like I could taste them. Even now, when I paint I get that nostalgic feeling I had in grade school, and I know I’m on the right track. The colors are taking me where they want to go.”

Adept at both painting and illustration, he nurtured his talents through high school and beyond, through a tour of duty in the Vietnam War and then through nearly 20 years of wanderlust that saw him drift from South Carolina to New York to San Francisco and back to the deep South again. Along the way, he took classes at seven different art institutions, sporadically exhibiting some of his work, and occasionally lending his talents to the Black Panthers, various non-profits, and even a handful of rock bands (some of Akhbar’s Knoxville rock ‘n’ roll flyer art was on display at the recent Refuse poster art show downtown).

But it was in Knoxville that Akhbar at last found an anchor, as well as a consistent creative spark. Homeless, he came to town in 1982 in hopes of finding work at the then-ongoing World’s Fair. He didn’t find a job, but he did find a home; he secured veterans’ disability benefits, and a place in the city’s community of artists and musicians.

Through poet and singer-songwriter R.B. Morris, he met local counter-cultural illustrators such as Eric Sublett and Peter Artin, with whom he has since often collaborated.

During one six-week stretch in the early ’80s, he and Artin conducted what he refers to now as a guerilla art campaign that served as a coming-out of sorts for Akhbar in Knoxville; every week the duo would salvage industrial-sized poster boards discarded by the Tennessee Valley Authority in an area dumpster, and create portraits they would then hang and leave, free for the taking, in the alley behind the old Rechenbach’s bookstore on Cumberland Avenue.

“That’s how and where I really began gaining recognition around here as an artist,” Akhbar says. “I did one portrait, a copy of a Matisse nude, that really caused a stir. I consider myself to be from the California school of art, and we don’t frown on doing a nude.”

Since then, anyone who has trafficked in the local art or music scenes has probably seen something of Akhbar’s creation. His paintings have graced the covers of CDs by Knoxville-based artists such as Blue Mother Tupelo and Donald Brown, and his work has appeared in most area galleries (there’s currently an Akhbar exhibit in the A-1 Gallery on the World’s Fair Site; he was also a featured artist at Pellissippi State Community College during Black History Month.)

Perhaps his best-known creation is a piece entitled The Blues Man, a Picasso-esque assemblage of colors and shapes that take the form of a man playing a guitar against a rural backdrop of sun, barbed wire and cotton fields; he proudly notes that he sold a Blues Man t-shirt to the actress Tyne Daley when she came to Knoxville for a movie role recently.

His apartment walls are crowded with other paintings and collage-style works that are just as striking and brashly colorful as Blues Man, as well as with various found-object sculptures, pieces such as The Axe, hanging above his computer table, a make-believe musical instrument composed from old guitar parts, barbed wire “strings,” some nameless metallic gizmos and a head fashioned from the top of a rusty five-gallon drum.

Not even his bathroom is free of artistic fodder; in the tub, wedged between the wall and a towel rack is the huge side of an old semi tire, a couple of broken fan belts, and a used baking pan.

“I’m kind of a junk man; I go out and bring back stuff, because you never know when you might use it,” Akhbar says.

Though he sells T-shirts and prints of his paintings, and often shows his portfolio at area festivals, commercial recognition is at best a tertiary consideration for Akhbar. “I knew an artist who told me once, ‘I could go to New York and make money, but I figure that if they want what I do, they’ll just have to come here.’ And that’s the way I feel. I don’t produce art for sale. Whatever comes along, comes along.

“I’m going to turn 59, and I feel good about it,” Akhbar says with a laugh and a gleeful swig from a bottle of Kaluha stashed under an easel next to his couch. “I’m where I wanted to be in my craft. I’m content in my passion.”

Wizard of Scum

A poet, singer, and all-around instigator of perfidy, Rus Harper can switch effortlessly from screeching acid lyrics at the front of a demented punk-rock unit to slinging barbed bon mots to an audience of sodden transients.

“I try to let the rock thing influence the spoken-word thing, and vice versa,” says Harper, former lead singer of unsavory local rock bands such as Neowizard and Evil Twin, and veteran host/reader at any number of area poetry slams and open mic nights.

“It is more fun to have a wall of rock noise behind you when you’re screaming out at motherfuckers, but I do love getting to sling words at people in a spoken-word forum. Once you start doing it in front of an audience, it’s highly addictive.”

But make no mistake, it is in his poetry and spoken-word performance that Harper vests most of his artistic pride. This summer, he will self-publish his 11th collection of verse and rant, a compendium entitled Dog Food for the Heathen Soul.

Seated and sipping a domestic beer at a local pub, Harper looks like some kind of archetype for the roles of rock madman and poet provocateur—his eyes wide and grinning, his long hair greasy and carelessly splayed, his angular face creased by laugh lines that only grow deeper and more sinister with each passing year. He has a nervous intensity about him, and he punctuates particularly salient points with a giddy chuckle and a look that’s more leer than smile.

Collected Poetry

An Athens, Ga., resident until age 15, Harper penned his first verse in high school—a reaction, he says, to “being in a hectic and sometimes violent home atmosphere, which gave me a need to put intense feelings down on paper for catharsis.

“It worked for catharsis,” he continues, “and it got to the point where I said, ‘Hey, this crap ain’t complete crap.’ And after a few years I found out that drunk people would actually buy some of it.”

Upon moving to Knoxville in 1976, he helped produce a few issues of a notorious underground newspaper entitled New School Spirit, a forum for his own inchoate verse as well as countercultural ramblings and illustrations from other contributors. “It [New School] had articles on ‘How to get your fake i.d.’; it was just some kids trying to be young Abbie Hoffmans,” he says.

His first spoken word performance took place in the informal setting of an old house in Fort Sanders, where in the early 1980s a few neighborhood residents would host “Hard Times, Free Soup” evenings, forums for locals to gather, read verse, drink beer, and eat soup.

“I’d written all these creepy little poems, and I felt the need to sling ‘em at people, get their reaction,” Harper says. “I became addicted to the idea of being onstage, in front of people, putting my crafted thoughts before an audience... getting all clever and shit.”

In the years since, Harper has served as frontman of a string of corrosive, theatrical punk and heavy metal outfits—bands like Teenage Love, and the aforementioned Neo-wizard and Evil Twin—and also as host of several regular open mic poetry sessions—first at the old Vic and Bill’s delicatessen on Cumberland Avenue, then at the Old City jazz club Annie’s, and later with “Rus’s Romper Room” at the infamous Fort Sanders dive/laundromat Gryphon’s in the 1990s.

He remembers that it was at Gryphon’s that he honed the command and fluency of his presentation, in part due to the necessity of answering the malcontents who would sometimes wander into the dilapidated venue on Highland Avenue. “All kinds of crazy drunks would stumble in, and I’d get heckled, and it helped my style,” he says. “It made me more of an aggressive reader. It made me deliver forcefully enough that people would pay attention.”

Such lessons serve him well, because even at seedier venues like Gryphon’s, Harper’s pungent verse often causes a stir. Less controversial are his lighter poems about dogs and beer. “I didn’t have a home address for a couple of years at one point, so I slept on couches and front porches in Fort Sanders,” Harper grins. “Now I feel like I can relate to the way dogs live . I know how they feel.”

But witty observations on the canine condition often give way to vitriolic screeds, profane recitations assailing God, government, and right-wing politics: A recent poem entitled “I Must Hate Freedom,” for instance, inspired by the U.S. war on terror, ends with Harper’s observation that, “Yes, I must hate freedom. At least the way they define it now.”

“I like to bitch about the hypocrisy of religion, and the violence people seem to be very comfortable visiting on other people, whether it’s beating up someone because they’re different, or sending in armies to kill brown people because you know what’s right for them,” Harper says. “Of course, if that kind of shit ever stopped, I’d have to fall back on writing all dog poems.”

When he’s not singing or slinging verse, Harper works full-time behind the camera at a local television station. And although he sells copies of his self-styled anthologies at spoken-word performances and rock shows, and occasionally through independent local retailers, he doesn’t harbor any illusions about the size of the audience for his molten rants.

“I never expected to make any kind of living at this,” Harper grins. “To me, it’s the coolest thing just being able to walk away from a reading and say, ‘Wow, I can buy myself dinner, or a couple of cases of beer. Just for writing these nasty poems.”

The Writing on the Wall

Pete Hoffecker’s ascent from the world of so-called underground art was necessitated by practical considerations, rather than artistic or even commercial ones. “One of my biggest drives in changing my mode of expression was that I had gotten arrested and gotten into trouble,” says Hoffecker, formerly active in the Knoxville area as a graffiti “writer,” and whose erstwhile tag was oft-seen at local graffiti hotspots.

“I still regard what I used to do as a respectable art form. It’s just that for me, the risks were no longer worth taking. It was time to find other outlets.”

A West Knoxvillian since early childhood, Hoffecker was introduced to graffiti culture as a student at Bearden High School. Though he had always kept a sketchbook of his colorful, cartoony illustrations as a kid, he says his first forays into graffiti were more about subversion than creation. “I was one of those rebellious teenagers,” Hoffecker says. “When I stumbled into graffiti art, the objectives were being seen and vandalism, not really making any kind of artistic statement.”

But that changed as Hoffecker’s natural inclinations gradually asserted themselves. His art morphed from the tell-tale signatures or “tagging” (referring to the personalized graffiti pseudonyms that writers often leave like territorial flags, simply to announce conquest) to a more illustrative style, full of pastel mountain ranges and ballooning yellow suns. At the peak of his writing, he was out as many as three times a week, after midnight, surrepetitiously decorating underpasses and train cars with his trademark letters and landscapes.

His artistic M.O. was forever altered about five years ago when he was arrested twice in the space of a few months, once by a passing bicycle cop as he wrote on an outdoor cooler with a magic marker, and again at a popular graffiti underpass off Grand Avenue that had been staked out by undercover detectives. “It was a sting operation. I was suddenly surrounded by all these guys I had thought were vagrants,” Hoffecker remembers. “They wanted to ask me a bunch of questions; they thought all graffiti is gang-related. But in Knoxville, most of the kids who do it are pretty smart kids who are just in that rebellious stage; they’re not at all gang-related.”

The arrests resulted in two years’ probation and some $3,000 in fines. Now 26, Hoffecker seeks legitimate forums for his street-savvy art, but says his work is often little better accepted above ground than it was below. Occasionally, he finds a place to show his wares—which most often take the form of acrylic paintings on wooden surfaces nowadays—at local coffee shops or independently-owned restaurants. More frequently, he says he finds only resistance from a local art community geared chiefly toward more mainstream creative expression.

“Most art councils aren’t very receptive to younger people; they’re looking for Bob Ross paintings and traditional landscape stuff,” Hoffecker says. “I think Knoxville is a hub, in that you’ve got a lot of young people getting an education here (at UT). But they don’t tend to stay here, because there are so few outlets to exhibit their work. I don’t see a place for riskier stuff.”

Hoffecker suggests that the solution to the problem of an under-served young artists’ community would be the reinvigoration of CHROMA, a local non-profit art co-op that formerly kept a base of operations in the Old City. Once active, the organization is now mostly dormant, though the name and the non-profit status have been retained.

In the meantime, Hoffecker and a group of six former University of Tennessee art students are seeking downtown or UT-area gallery space, in hopes of fomenting that same kind of cooperative synergy.

In the longer term, Hoffecker would like to see Knoxville create a “free wall”—an outdoor public space dedicated to open artistic expression, graffiti-style, the likes of which has been embraced in other graffiti-heavy urban areas. “I went to kindergarten in St. Paul [Minn.], and still remember my whole class going out to paint at the free wall there,” he says. “I think that sort of place would inspire more creativity in more people.

“There’s a reason why kids go out and write in public places; many of them feel alienated from any kind of art scene or community. A lot of writers consider themselves to be beautifying the landscape, not defacing it. It’s a reaction to feeling stifled, creating this sort of idealized vision of a painted city.”

May 6, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 19 © 2004 Metro Pulse