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Lonnie Holley review – America’s wreckage made into magical art
The artist and musician reclaims beauty and meaning from rubbish, decay and death, using materials from rusted padlocks to old organ pipes. It’s raw, inspiring and absolutely joyous
He compares his way of making art with the resourcefulness of Martin Luther King who, in prison in Birmingham, Alabama, for fighting its segregation laws in 1963, “wrote on toilet paper”. I don’t spot any toilet paper in the show but I do see a massive dirt-stained firehose wrapped like a flattened python round a stack of old wooden chairs, a collection of shooting-range targets, a ladder necklaced with barbed wire. Photo: Truett DietzAnd that’s when dry, rationalist comparisons with Rauschenberg or whoever give way to pure pleasure in seeing Holley’s compulsion to improvise art from America’s wreckage.
Or read this on The Guardian