Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger.

THE ART OF THORNTON DIAL, remarkable black artist of Alabama, recently challenged New York at the New Museum on Broadway downtown and at the Museum of American Folk Art off Broadway uptown. One message was, or seemed to be, Abandon your theoreticism and get on down to line, form, and color, and to social criticism in vernacular terms. Randall Morris argues that academic discourse is inadequate when aimed at visionary artists like Dial.(1) I would agree: black artists who preach and signify in an abiding idiom of the spirit elude the agnostic nets of Modernism, deconstruction, post-Modernism, and other analytic trends. The vein of the vernacular, predating the Modernist and postdating the post, is, to paraphrase Amiri Baraka, a changing forever.

Hence Image of the Tiger, the book on Dial published alongside the recent exhibitions, mixes savor with the problematic: how can the instruments of Western art history deal with a person working beyond the West yet within the West, and despite it? Critic and polemicist Thomas McEvilley and playwright/poet/activist Baraka accept the challenge of Dial's complexity; gracing Image of the Tiger, their essays recognize the black nationality, real and fundamental, that generates and names his work.

McEvilley starts with this: Dial translates into sculpture and into paint "a culture within a culture that has its own dynamic reality." How to recognize that dynamic when we see it? When it is self-revealed as part of a linked universe of recurring forms. Cultural repetitions bind Dial to the black South, and both, ultimately, to the mother continent. With an artist like the Cuban Jose Bedia, now resident in Miami, resemblances to African cultures are deliberate and specific. In Kongo, priests make secret sheds in the woods, and call on the moon for permission to cut branches of power for insertion as items of spiritual militance in the sacred charms (minkisi) they keep there--and so does Bedia, in his ritualizing art. Dial's contacts, though, are not so much with Africa as with the Old Time Religion, its shouts and ecstasies blending Christianity and traces of the spirit in African terms. He refers to this source in the title Sanctified Dancing--dancing in the spirit of Jesus.

In a painting of this name from 1992, a maelstrom of revolving faces dissolves the Old Time Religion practice of worship in a circle, which may echo the ring-shout structure of Kongo.(2) But in another work with the same title, also from 1992, women raising their hands in ecstasy cite the transatlantic gesture of felicity that Bakongo term yangalala and relate to the coming of the spirit. Yangalala is generic. It can turn up with a victory on a football field or at a track meet as well as in church. For the sacred and the profane are tightly intermingled in the black Atlantic world; what happens amidst the pews can turn up in the blues or in slang or in rap.

Such continuities help explain the theme of the tiger in Dial's painting. The tiger is a cat; In many West and Central African civilizations, particularly those that most influenced the Americas (Yoruba, Ejagham, Kongo), the cat is a sign of sovereignty. To McEvilley, Dial's tiger is shorthand for one man's struggle, one man's relation to the diaspora. If so, under this sign Dial compounds culture with identity.

Over 80 paintings reproduced in Image of the Tiger spotlight tigers, and bear titles like The Freedom Cat and the Hard Tin Men, The Tiger Who Flew over New York City, and Peace Tiger for the World (Honoring Ralph Bunche). The settings are modern; some works, as in the allusion to black diplomat and Nobelist Bunche, are overtly political. But praising persons by reference to the feline is a longtime riff of the people. We did not praise King Oliver or John Coltrane by any animal image other than the cat. Under black tutelage, white America came to hear of "cats," hip, hep, and otherwise, in the days of swing, bop, and boogie-woogie. Cat is a person, beloved and wise.

This history dovetails with the theme of the royal feline in classical African art--with the whiskers on the cheek of the Olokun Walode head from medieval Nigeria, and with the superb leopard statuary that suggested beauty and intimidation at the court of Benin City in the 1550s. In ancient Kongo, the theme of the feline equally underscored powers of confidence and mastery, as in the phrase Ngo ka ye nkanda?, Is there a leopard within the clan?, meaning, Do we not have a king to rule over us, seated in glory on the skin of a great cat? A painted stone from the Apollo 11 cave in Namibia, radiocarbon-dated to 26,300 years B.C., depicts an evident feline with human legs. The existential leap of the great cat extends, then, from paleolithic southern Africa to the international urban parlance of today, in a persistence invisible to those obsessed with change and obsolescence.

If praise via felinization is Africanizing, Dial's usage is personal, inventive, and protean. In Bowlegged John, 1990, a strong, virile artist is set in a sea of responding faces. Rendered in powerful strokes of green and blue and white, these faces come alive: sparks of red surround their mouths, surround their eyes, for the vision of the artist has excited their blood. Hidden in the sea of faces are three small felines. Their paws and faces burn with the tints of spiritual rapture. Did Dial mean that these were lovers, persons he cared for, whom he hoped would take his gifts and make matters happen, taking the leap? Such handling of the metaphor is unprecedented in Africa. Dial owns his own feelings. He blends them with the past.

Considering the complexity of Dial's voice, it is good that the volume offers the perspective of another writer, Baraka, who translates Dial's power as a "fearful symmetry" expressing "social motion" and intensity. Deriding "primitive art," whatever that was, Baraka straightforwardly links Dial to sub-Saharan Africa and the American South, "land base of the Afro-American nation." With a dramatist's eye, he casts Dial as a blend of Romare Bearden and John Henry: yesterday Dial had nothing "to sell but the muscle in his arm"; today, increasingly famous, he remains "the black worker. His hands look like worker's hands." Baraka translates the equation "feline equals black person" in his own stark terms: "Nigger-beast-self." Yet shock is a cover for inner affection. Dial needs this strength, Baraka argues, because he represents the creativity of the whole Deep South. And Baraka also notes Dial's celebration of perception, and his gestures of a "black preacher praying against all odds."

Finally Baraka drops a clue to Dial that future studies will complete: "Inside the picture all the images are bound together speaking." In their stylized interlocking, multiple voices announce a universe of cultural difference. Future critics may distinguish Jackson Pollock's cyclings from the nebulae of Dial by linking Pollock to the heating up of abstraction under the pressures of Thomas Hart Benton (his sexy lines), bop, Navaho sandpainting, Pablo Picasso, and others, linking Dial to the ring shout, hocketing fusions of voice and face and tiger. Dial's "parlometrics," to borrow from Alan Lomax, lead from the Ituri via Kongo and New Orleans to rap's esthetic interruptions--all performers talking at once, yet leaving spaces for one another.

Image of the Tiger is an excellent beginning. The next book, let us hope, will rank Dial's works (his sculptures seem stronger than his paintings, his paintings stronger than his drawings) and place them more firmly in context and temporal perspective. The flash and array of the Deep South yard show, for example, haunts Dial. There are plate trees in Kongo and bottle trees in Arkansas, and Dial once mirrored them in a painting with a memorable theme of spiritual embottlement. Lengths of garden hose, Jordans in miniature, grace black graves and tombstones; Dial incorporates this strange medium of the spirit in one of his paintings. Above all, African images are palisades, they guard, they filter, they watch--as does Dial's masterpiece sculpture of a cat surmounted by fowls and surmounting skeletal persons, perhaps warning, like Kongo boneyards: Mess with us and go to death. Comparisons with black music are even more telling. And so Dial continues, fixing and crystallizing the moments of his life in terms of his culture, radiant and transcendent.

1. Randall Morris, speech at Yale University, fall 1993.

2. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 31-97.

REAL LIFE ROCK GREIL MARCUS' TOP TEN

1 RICKIE LEE JONES: "Rebel Rebel," on Traffic from Paradise (Geffen). One of the really great David Bowie songs, brought to life with the intimacy of two people off in the bathroom halfway through a concert, fixing their makeup and talking their heads off.

2 JIMMY REED, THE SPANIELS, ETC.: The Vee-Jay Story (Vee-Jay 3-CD reissue, 1953-65). An imaginatively programmed assemblage of gritty, close-to-the-ground smashes and obscurities from the black-owned Chicago label that in 1963 brought America the Beatles ("Please Please Me" fell short of the charts; "From Me to You" struggled to #116) and went belly up three years later. For the paranoid inside story of the emergence and ruin of this pioneering company, see Joseph C. Smith's novel The Day the Music Died, from 1981; for the prosaic version, in which genius and genre coexisted in a state of exquisite tension, listen to the alcoholic prophecies of Jimmy Reed's primitive "High & Lonesome," the doo-wop swoon of the El Dorados' "At My Front Door," the doom-struck pop rhythms of Dee Clark's "Your Friends," and the overwhelming emotional striptease of Little Richard's greatest blues, "I Don't Know What You've Got But It's Got Me." The year is 1965; Richard, wailing, testifying, madly gesticulating, is the genius; an unknown Jimi Hendrix, on guitar, is the genre. And two years later they'd changed places.

3 MIKE LEIGH, WRITER & DIRECTOR: Naked. This portrait of rape in present-day London may be a parable of the ruins of Thatcherism, but there are older echoes. Charming scum Johnny (David Thewlis) might be a time-traveler from the plague years; he seems almost to rot as the movie goes on. His exgirlfriend Louise (Lesley Sharp) has the sort of deep, heavy face that pretty much left the screen when talkies arrived. She can recall Gloria Swanson, or even Albert Dieudonne in Abel Gance's Napoleon. Still, no-future is what the film is always about: erasing the future as it comes into being, registering what's being left behind and letting it go. Desperate for company, a guard in an empty deluxe office building takes a homeless Johnny inside and guides him through the place; he clears locks with some sort of post-Modern security wand, a black baton with a white tip. "What's that," says Johnny, "a Dadaist nun?"

4 EUGENE ATGET: Atget Paris (Hazan, Paris, and Gingko Press, 24 10th St., #E-G, Santa Rosa, CA 95401, $55). Atget was a real street photographer--that is, he took pictures of streets, not of "street life"--and from the 1890s to about 1914 he mapped the Paris that had escaped the enormous hands of Baron Haussmann, from the Pont Neuf in the 1st arrondissement to the falling-down shacks at the farthest edges of the 20th. People who know--Louis Chevalier, for one, in his 1977 The Assassination of Paris--will tell you that Atget's city was destroyed in our own time, and that to reach for the smoky auras captured in the 840 photos collected here is sheer romanticism, no matter how seemingly familiar a lot of Atget's streets still look. Well, give it a test. Unlike so many other Atget volumes, this is no coffee table book. At 5 1/2 by 7 5/8 by 2 1/2 inches, it's like an elegant brick; you can hold it in your hand, using the pictures as a map of the city, following where they lead, and see if the city is still there.

5/6 IRIS DEMENT: Infamous Angel (Warner Bros.) & BRATMOBILE: The Real Janelle (Kill Rock Stars). The future of the past--the past being, respectively, the catch and curl of Dolly Parton's voice in "My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy" and the unaccompanied mountain ballads she harks back to, and the glee and resentment of old Blondie records like "Rip Her to Shreds" and old Au Pairs records like "It's Obvious." Plus just a hint of "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow."

7 JOYCE CAROL OATES: "Waiting on Elvis, 1956," in Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry, ed. Jim Elledge (Indiana University Press, $12.95). Set in a cafe in Charlotte called Chuck's ("I was 26 married but still/waiting tables"), written in 1987, and the most convincing Elvis-Clinton sighting yet: "I slapped at him a little saying, You/sure are the one aren't you feeling my face burn but/he was the kind of boy even meanness turned sweet in/his mouth./Smiled at me and said, Yeah honey I guess I sure am."

8 BAND: "Remedy," on The Tonight Show (NBC, 22 February). With drummer Levon Helm, organist Garth Hudson, and bassist Rick Danko accompanied by new guitarist, pianist, second drummer, and a four-man Tonight Show horn section, they were better than on their recent Jericho--John Hiatt's "Buffalo River Home," from his Perfectly Good Guitar, is probably a better Band imitation than anything on Helm & Co.'s first album since guitarist Robbie Robertson left and pianist Richard Manuel killed himself. But this night there was a spark in the sound, muscle and play--and a definite, appropriate ordinariness. In 1968, when these men first announced themselves as The Band, the emphasis seemed to be on the "The," as a statement of arrogance, which they proceeded to live up to. Now both capital letters might as well be gone. With a pretty good Diet Coke commercial based on "The Weight" running on TV, they played, sang, and carried themselves with a humility so complete it might not support any name at all.

9 JULIANA HATFIELD THREE: "My Sister" (Mammoth). Nancy Kerrigan's soul sister, anyway.

10 TOM PETTY: "I Won't Back Down" (MCA, 1989). How long before people here and there will be able to hear this without thinking of Dr. David Gunn, shot to death last year as he arrived for work at a Pensacola abortion clinic? Not long before, Gunn, armed with a cassette machine, faced a crowd of protesters and blared the song right at them--not only because its message was right, you might imagine, but because the song made him feel more alive. Listening to it today, joined to the history it helped make, you can hear Petty take what on paper is no more than an exercise in the obvious past itself, or vice versa.

Greil Marcus is a contributing editor of Artforum. His Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92 has just been published in paper by Anchor, New York.