Butch
Anthony has a word – a word which he concocted himself. A word which he
designed to precisely describe his unique personal style of art and artistic
discovery. That word is “intertwangleism.”
Intertwangleism, as an artistic style, appears to be part cubism,
part da-da, part expressionism, part science, part spirit, and, not at all
least, part tongue-in-cheek. Intertwangleism takes a thing,
any thing, and breaks it apart
into its basic elements, elements not of science, but of another scheme, a
scheme found only in Butch Anthony’s mind. Butch discovered the rudimentary
rules of intertwangleism many
years ago, when as child he collected
stuff. But back then he didn’t know what to call it.
Butch
Anthony has been a collector of stuff
as long as he can remember. His first collecting endeavors were accomplished
by walking the freshly plowed fields of his native Russell County, in search
of, and finding, literally thousands of flint points, potsherds, stone
tools, shell beads, and other prehistoric Indian artifacts that littered the
surface of the Alabama ground near his childhood home and Big Uchee Creek.
He also collected many other things, including dried scabs created from his
own frequently injured elbows and knees, the product of numerous
hard-driving bicycle calamities on the hard clay back roads of
Seale, where he grew up.
As a
teenager, he collected beer cans (empty ones), by the thousands – “no two
alike”, he says. He fondly remembers trading for one especially interesting
can (which he still has). It was “called Old Frothinslosh - it had a naked
fat lady on it. I would stare at it for hours”. He collected fossils from
the cretaceous outcrops that occur all around Russell County, amassing
thousands of shark’s teeth, hundreds of pieces of petrified wood, and scores
of fossilized bones from ancient turtles, monstrous mosasaurs, and gigantic
extinct fish. He became something of a local celebrity when a picture
appeared in the Columbus Ledger of young Butch proudly displaying one of his
recent fossil discoveries. When he was just 14, he single-handedly built a
log cabin to house his many collections - the bones, antlers, insects,
artifacts, fossils, bottles, tools, rocks and minerals, and lots of other
stuff – a cabin that he still uses
today as a painting studio. Now, as an adult, he says he collects “homemade
shoeshine boxes with handmade foots on the top - and beetles that fly into
my barn at night. They are in
this show.” What would he
collect, of all things collectable, if only he could? “A tail feather from a
live Ivory-billed peckerwood,” he says, “And now’s my chance.”
According to
Butch, “Collectors are a bunch of freaks. Most of them are obsessive about
it. I give most of my stuff away and then I move on to something else. And
best of all you don’t have to be rich to collect the junk I collect, ‘cause
nobody else but me wants it. Lately I've been trying to collect this one
butterfly that comes to my garden every summer, but I just can't catch him.
I hope I never do. “
Now, using the
expanded principles of intertwangleism,
based in the lifelong collecting routine that he’s developed over the
years, Butch Anthony gathers, absorbs, classifies, dissects, and reassembles
all things that his eye and mind encompasses and, from that, creates
wonderful new stuff of his own making. Like Butch himself, his art is deceptive.
It seems so simple and so plain -- almost impossibly raw and innocent -- but
it ain’t so. Every piece contains the mystery of
intertwangleism – and that’s what makes them great.
Fred C. Fussell
Buena Vista,
Georgia