Crank Prophet Bestride America, Grinning (Part Five)
from The Shape of Things to Come, 2006
With David Thomas’s death on April 24, I want to do what can to keep the work of someone I was lucky to know alive in the little corner of the public mind this newsletter might reach. I’ve written a lot about David’s work over the years; my piece from Artforum in December 1997, and this chapter from my 2006 book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, is some of it. (This is the fifth and final part of the chapter. Part One is available here, Part Two is available here, Part Three is available here, and Part Four is available here.)
The Shadow Knows
“Maybe I’m nothing but a shadow on the wall,” Thomas sang in “Heart of Darkness” in 1975; he learned to sing like one. He is an exemplar of the uncivilized, primitive, philosophically addled, unshutuppable American, the Midwesterner who figured out that just as you can always talk about the weather you might as well talk about what’s actually on your mind. His Gnostic argument—that art exists at once to reveal secrets and preserve them—makes sense of a particularly American form of storytelling, part yammering tall tale (“BUT DON’T TELL A SOUL!”), part muffled secret (“Pass it on”).