What to Do with a Dead Body - or "Art Southern Style
Written: Aug 14 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The most hilarious exhibition you'll ever see
Cons: Sometimes reminds you of a junk yard
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| Petra's Full Review: Atlanta |
By the wondrous ways of the Internet I made a number of friends over time. Okay, I should probably rather call them acquaintances since I really don’t know an awful lot about most of them other than what they chose to reveal via e-mail. One exception though is a teacher from Texas, whom we shall name Lucy for this piece.
One day, as I was sitting at work amusing myself with writing e-mails (maybe I should change my own name for this piece), Lucy wrote to me and asked what I would think about her visiting me. I spent a few e-mails in an attempt to make it perfectly clear that my husband and I live in a shoebox with a petting zoo and that there is not much going on in this small southern town, but she wouldn’t be deterred.
So by the time Lucy and her son arrived, we had frantically thought up some ways to entertain them a little and one of our plans was to visit Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden in Summerville, Georgia.
Some of you may recall Summerville as the home of the attorney in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It is about 2 hours from Atlanta and all you need to do is find it on the map. Once there, everybody in town you ask will be able to direct you to Paradise Gardens.
Some may even have heard of Howard Finster before. After all, his folk art is exhibited in the Smithsonian, or so I am told. There is an annual festival for the Reverend Howard Finster, and he even designed album covers for R.E.M. and The Talking Heads. Good stuff, hm? So off we went to visit the Paradise Gardens.
My husband had already been there once so I had heard plenty about the peculiarity of the place, but for Lucy and her son, this turned out to be the highlight of their trip. Paradise Gardens is nothing more than what probably once was Mr. Finster’s backyard, now filled with a sky-high tower of rusty bicycles, a wall with embedded mason jars that hold tonsils from who knows whom and an occasional pink flamingo worked into a piece of folk art.
Above the mason jars, bits and pieces of glass and stone are plastered onto that particular piece of art, as well as a plethora of cheap, cheesy plastic toys. And the one spot not to miss on a Paradise Garden tour would be the visitors center, the little house that belongs to this back yard. Filled with the strangest items, it also sells T-shirts decorated with the artist's paintings, which usually revolve around the devil himself either having you in his vice, getting you in his vice, planning to get you in his vice, and some useful advice on how to avoid the devil's vice.
All of those T-shirts, as well as pretty much anything else that had room for it, sport these phrases with every word so utterly misspelled that we couldn't help but giggle while reading every single one of them. All along, Howard Finster's tent revival tapes were playing in the background - a strange concoction of yodeling and hollering of which I understood rather little ... well, typical tent revival stuff.
We walked through the gardens and marveled - not necessarily at the art of it, but at the strangeness of it all. Old, wrecked cars with "This is what happens when you drive drunk" scribbled all over them and advice to "always check under the hood for bombs before getting in your vehicle", were probably the least strange; a propped-up casket in a little chapel which is claimed to be Finster’s own ready-to-go final resting place; things one would commonly consider junk were piled all over, covered in as many writings as the walkways and walls of every building in the garden. But the strangest was still to come.
After strolling around for a good while, we left the exhibition and sat outside the building because we were told the artist himself was going to be there soon and speak to his visitors. We thought that this would be a nice touch for Lucy and her son, to meet this highly admired man of the south. As we sat there, my husband leafed through a little Paradise Garden publication he had picked up inside the gift shop while Lucy patiently listened to an old man who seemed to desperately hope for a conversation with somebody. Looking at the publication, too, I noticed something I had overlooked while inside: "The Tomb of the Unknown Person?" I asked when I noticed the headline.
It didn’t take long for the old man to volunteer the whole story about that. "Oh yeah," he told us. "That was a few years back, they found this dead body in the basement of these folks here in town."
Our new friend told us in a conspiratory tone that he did know the people’s name but would rather not reveal it, because they still lived in town. But, he added, "they’re good folks," to which my husband replied: "Except for the occasional body in the basement you mean?"
The old man didn’t pay attention to that. He went on to tell us that nobody could figure out who the body was, so they had a dentist from another town come over to look at the teeth. "He said them bones were like, real old," was the astonishing prognosis, according to our old friend.
At this point we still had some sort of faith in the rightness of things, but we were soon surprised when the old man told us that since the city didn’t know whose body this was, and wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, they called … no, you guessed wrong. Not the FBI, but the town artist.
Yep, this body was handed over to Howard Finster, and now rests in the artist’s Paradise Garden in the Tomb of the Unknown Person, we were told. We were somewhat suspicious of the story, but the old man told us that he worked at Paradise Gardens and even had some of his art exhibited inside.
By then, the Reverend Finster had arrived, and we wandered over to take a close look at the strange old man. He sat on the porch before the parrot cage doling out advice to visitors and insisting to teach my husband to play the banjo before handing it over to our old man with the strange story. As he played the banjo, we said our good-byes and left.
Lucy still laughs about the visit in this strange place and her son has vowed to make all of his friends save up to come for another trip.
Who says you can’t find something interesting in a small Georgia town?
Recommended:
Yes
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Petra
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Location: California
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About Me:
If life gives you lemons ... there's always someone deserving of being pelted with fruit
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