The Empire S.N.A.F.U. Restoration Project
By Michael Idov
Here’s one problem with found/naïve/outsider art: its rather porous definition extends to anything that superficially looks like it. In many cases, the subject actively resists the embrace. Inquire from a street prophet "fizzing with insanity" (M. Amis) whether he’d be interested in moving his act to PS1, and you’ll see what I mean. There’s a bemused condescension inherent in the randomness with which we pluck an occasional Henry Darger out of the vast lineup of the underclass unhinged. Not to mention that this sort of thing is usually done posthumously: the presence of the breathing, farting artist only muddies the conceptual waters.
For several years now, E. Stephen Frederick has been championing his own pet genius: a late, homeless eccentric who went under the name of S.N.A.F.U. (don’t expect to find out what the abbreviation stands for) and spent his last years constructing macabre "nests" from industrial waste. Artistic reconstructions of these objects, made by Frederick and intermittently available for public viewing, are by turns violent, queasy, poetic, clever and vile; but these, of course, are words reserved for art. Thing is, the author (be it S.N.A.F.U. or Frederick himself, who, as the collection’s sole curator, restorer and interpreter, is naturally under suspicion) refuses the label. It is up to us to evoke the "found art" clause (i.e., "whatever we call art is art") or to go with the anthropological approach. Curiously, in the latter case, Frederick becomes the villain of the piece: a conventionalizing agent. The curator appeared aware of this dilemma — relishing it, in fact — during our recent conversation.
MI: Under what circumstances did you first encounter the legacy of S.N.A.F.U.?
ESF: It goes back a ways. When I was 12, I dropped out of a small town public school. Had I stayed, I almost certainly would have died, either via suicide or by getting gay-bashed (I’m not gay, but I was pretty androgynous). Since I wasn’t in school, I had time to seek things out on my own. I spent a lot of time wandering around abandoned industrial buildings. I started meeting other freaky people who seemed to already have gone through what I was going through. Some of them were part of something called "The Dead Children of the Empire, Inc." I have never been an acting member, but it was the first group of people I ever felt truly accepted by. It was through them that I first started hearing about this almost mythic character named S.N.A.F.U. I should note that by this point, S.N.A.F.U. was already deceased, albeit recently. Through contacts of "The Dead Children of the Empire" I first saw some of S.N.A.F.U.’s assemblages and modules. At the time, they were scattered over many locations and many were very damaged. I also heard references to the great "Nidus-Monad" which S.N.A.F.U.’s objects collectively comprised. Many spoke reverently of S.N.A.F.U. and seemed set on preserving aspects of IT’s ideological legacy, but there was minimal organized effort to preserve the physical legacy of the Nidus-Monad. I gradually fell into embracing that duty.
MI: Define your role as a curator. Does your being in charge of the context and the mode of presentation tempt you to impose your own reading onto the material? Do you resist that temptation? Do you consider S.N.A.F.U. an artist or a practical ideologue (revolutionary, failed cult leader etc.) whose work has been posthumously recontextualized as art? Isn’t such recontextualization reductive and detrimental? And if so, aren’t you, in fact, to blame?
ESF: These are important and complicated questions. First off, I hope it doesn’t seem like evasion, but it is not my place as curator to insinuate my own considerations or opinions concerning S.N.A.F.U. If I cease to be neutral, I am a worse than an opponent of S.N.A.F.U.’s work. I must separate my own judgment and ego from decision-making processes involving the work. For the most part, I keep it simple and stick to presenting the actual physical artifacts and let them speak for themselves.
To continue answering the next part of you question, obviously S.N.A.F.U. cannot be viewed strictly as a practical ideologue. Neither can S.N.A.F.U. be considered a failed cult leader. Below is one response of S.N.A.F.U. after being called "an artist": "IT is not an artist. IT supplies no surrogate social signifiers to culture barons. IT does not strive to express emotion. IT does not espouse personal experience as truth. IT professes no content or intent." As to recontextualization, indeed this issue has been a perplexing and difficult one to resolve. I hope that I have made right decisions, given S.N.A.F.U.’s attempt to destroy all record of IT’s work, the Restoration Project has been a violation of S.N.A.F.U.’s wishes from inception. I have never deceived myself into thinking that re-showing S.N.A.F.U.’s work now is a continuation of it — the same way that people who do historic reenactments of the civil war aren’t fighting slavery… It’s the difference between committing murder and doing an autopsy.
MI: Prove to me that S.N.A.F.U. is not a mystification. What’s being done to raise the general public’s awareness of the basic facts of his physical existence?
ESF: The proof is in the pudding. In time the public’s awareness is inevitable. The interesting part is what happens afterwards.