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AN ARTIST IN AMERICA
By Jack Bowman © 1998
Thomas Hart Benton wrote "An Artist in America" in 1937, before the second world war. I have read it several times and it has influenced my life as an artist. The "snake dance" and "speaking in tongues" in the performance art piece DECLARATION OF THE ARTIST is directly linked to Bentons book. He wrote:
"The peculiar brand of ecstatic religion popularly known as the Holy Roller Faith which has been sweeping the South for the last fifteen years, and which is such a wild mixture of sex, exhibitionism, and hysteria, had its origin in that home of extravagant idiocy, Los Angeles, California."
Benton was concerned with the common man and his beliefs. Benton was one of the few intellectuals that chose to observe the Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia mountain man. The "Hillbilly". Benton saw something there that others would not even take the time to look. I thank him for that. Totally and completely. The speaking in tongues was observed by Benton and he recorded:
"Other factors than sexual ones enter, of course, into the attractions of Holiness. Poor, beaten people rising to testify find themselves, for the moment, the center of attention and thereby get soem compensation for the miseries of their unnoticed lives. If in testimonial they can work up the courage to experiment with the gift of tongues, they become the Lord's anointed and receive fervid attention. The gibberish of the "Lord's language", a meaningless play of consonants - "Miki Taki Meka Keena Ko-o-o-o-la Ka" -is much affected in testimonial exhibition and is invariably rewarded with shouts of approval and vigorous amens."
The greatest contrubution Benton has made to my performance art material was from this writing:
"The bad name going with the appellation hillbilly has, I believe, come largely from those areas where industrial development has run a devastating hand into old custom, destroying the delicate social adjustments of generatrions and giving sanction, by ruthsless example, to all sorts of willful brutalities. The highly strung individualism of the mountain man, has utter faith in the rightness of his personal will, which is developed even beyond that of most Americans, functions pretty satisfactorily in a simple agricultural background where certain ways, beliefs, and restrictions are regarded, because of their long standing, as manifestations of the will of God. Where, however, willful individualism, uneducated and suspicious of the new, comes in contact with shrewd, exploitative devices of business and industry, where patently, even to the simplest, God has been thrust aside inthe interests of profit, it becomes radily explosive."
Many of my performances reflect this conflict between the needs of the individual and the exploitative nature of Capitalism. These conflicts came to their fullness with "Strike" and "American's Second Civil War".
To go to Chapter 2 THOMAS HART BENTON AND PERSEPHONE 
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