Bruce Burris at Braunstein/Quay Gallery

One of Diane Arbus's photographs shows a young, just married Southern couple ready for their wedding night. A sign on the truck reads something like "She got me today, but I'll get her tonight." Bruce Burris's White Boys! explores in paintings and constructions the same themes as Arbus, except that while Arbus juxtaposes that pathetic failed humor and repellent bravado with its buck-toothed author and his doomed bride, Burris focuses on the peculiar way in which the energies of folk art and folk humor are mobilized and mangled in broader social narratives and constructions of identity. Burris's white boys are rednecks of the beer-guzzling, prayer shouting, Dixie-whistling sort. What Burris shows is how these folks' self-effacing humor and the folk artist's virtues of modesty and perseverance are turned into compulsive visual self-expression as self-embarrassment.

Burris adopts from outsider art the principle of manic accretion of elements and simple gestures; every bit of canvas is decorated lovingly yet mechanically, and every border is treated as support for some further attachment. Each canvas is a thicket of signs, monochrome dottings, and efficiently drawn, stereotypical images.

Overwhelmingly dominant are the signs, mostly expressing pride in the author's ignorance, along with occasional praise of Jesus and impotent suspicion of outsiders. Bird cages, branches and rebel flags are appended to show that the artist can and, given time, will cobble elements on endlessly. Like time, the canvas must be tilled. The redneck attempts to cover up some sense of himself as void and to generate a sense of his identity by offering signs to the world. Burris's renderings of the signs preserve their misspellings ("He's Larning," "Room fer yer Kind"). In a few places, Burris acknowledges quilting as one source for the style of dense, overall composition through accretion, but mostly the painted swatches are drowned in antic, self-demeaning signage.

What saves Burris's pieces from degenerating into simple parody of the abject other is his interest in explaining how the self-mockery is a response to a broader imperative, the social demand that the Southern redneck market himself and his particularities. Many signs refer to the Southern heritage industry of Civil War sites and backwoods pioneers. The shotgun-toting hicks of Daniel Boone leading the Settlers through the Gap, praising Jesus and demanding that you "keep off my touchy parts" at once reenact a myth of foundation and reassure the urban viewer that she is missing nothing in not being there.

Bruce Burris, A reeel Hatewave, 1999, mixed media, 42" x 33",
Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco

It's hard to decide, though, whether these references to a national discourse prevent Burris's work from presenting a condescending view of  his rednecks. In the case of  Arbus's photograph, the ghastliness of what is shown removes any self-inhibition on the part  of the viewer, however complex her response in other respects: yes, those hicks really are that bad. Burris mimes folk art for technique, but the technique’s determined hamhandedness leaves the viewer little to do save read through the works and conclude that the makers of the signs really are damned stupid. To this extent, Burris's work reflects a much larger, perhaps unresolvable problem in contemporary art: how to address an audience larger than the art world without condescension or abdication of critical intelligence.

                      -John Rapko

  Bruce Burris-White Boys! closed February 12 at Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco.

  John Rapko is a freelance writer based in Northern California