Tunneling down the furrow of Illinois 128 in end-of-September weather, accelerating between walls of high corn and simmering waves of light, I detect a little black glitch in my peripheral vision. Some strange shape flies into the ambient brightness then instantly vanishes.

Route 128 points like an arrow to Shelbyville, the county seat of Shelby County. And on subsequent and better charted trips down the two-lane blacktop, I positively identify the UFO as a black plywood silhouette of a crow, realistically perched on a single section of white picket fence artfully wedged into the glowing wall of corn. A farmhouse stands in the background, and I immediately sense the deliberately staged quality of the scene, a rural tableau replete with rusty-hooped wagon wheel, imitation (two-dimensional) birdhouses in various pastels, and plentiful clumps of Spanish moss curled and draped into frames.

The crow, I later realize, is a subspecies of a larger population of matte-painted silhouettes: the Dobermans reared up on hind legs and caught in a permanent fighting stance outside Hillsboro on Route 16, the turn-of- the-century farmer and wife (with real bandannas) waving goodbye to Illinois motorists as they cross over into Indiana on Interstate 74, the conductor and old-fashioned locomotive riding the roof of Stan's Restaurant in Findlay, the flying Canada geese flapping their black wings on the walls of Wooter's Sport Shop on the nearby Bruce Road.

Even my closest neighbor, Arliss (not his real name but close enough), has positioned a silhouette of a young girl with watering can at the edge of his bean and tomato garden. Whenever 1 behold her, I do the proverbial Double Take. For these outlined figures are performing a kind of prairie version of M.C. Escher's trompe 1'oeil deception, exciting the edges of the cerebral cortex where the meaning of meaning resides.

Silhouette art has dislocated my thinking, making me conscious of the fact that what I "see" of the world (including people and ideas) is often a two-dimensional artifice. I am, in fact, studded with more silhouettes than any portion of the landscape — an insight both disturbing and oddly liberating. But isn't that the point of art — to liberate us and explicate our private spaces? I was being forced to reconstruct my all-too-solid prairie as a mere panorama of subtle cutouts on an endlessly pink horizon of steeples, barns, windmills and willow trees.

Here were these anonymous artists improbably turning the hybridized world of agricultural Illinois into the stuff of art. Somehow they had made the leap from thinking of the museum as a metaphor for the world to redefining the world as a museum. They became the self-appointed and unpaid curators of this big airy space, installing free-standing artwork on the most visible roadsides and ridges. In a commercialized culture where we mount glitzy shows of Monet and Van Gogh, turning "high art" into mega- media events (TV documentaries and "specials") and marketing opportunities (Monet's water lilies into postcards, Van Gogh's starry night into a tote bag), art has become a very serious business. These silhouette-makers, throwbacks to the creators of portrait silhouettes and paper cutouts of the 18th and 19th centuries, remind us that, at some irreducible level, art must always be fun.

Now I am not suggesting that plywood figures (including Holstein lawn cows and mushrooms), painted saws, spray-painted willow wreaths, two-dimensional birdhouses, tin Christmas figures (Santa, the Elves and Frosty), "antiqued" spice racks, various Cute Things (ice skates fashioned from pipe-cleaners and paper clips, snowmen created by cleverly stacking smaller and smaller inverted flower pots atop each other after daubing them white) will supplant Da Vinci or Degas. And I freely concede that it is sometimes powerfully frustrating to distinguish outright Trash (broken buttons and old ballpoint pens) from so-called Collectibles (old soda bottles, bits of barbed wire and matchbook covers); Kitsch (Lincoln ashtrays and busts, usually in the form of obscenely bronzed-over pot metal) from Popular Art (old movie posters. Star Trek lunch boxes, Coca Cola signs and Mr.

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Peanut lapel pins). It is even harder to draw the line between Folk Art and the unrecognized and largely Unfunded Art of which I speak. Most computer-literate citizens in the 1990s (a handy demographic grouping) would probably consider a Shaker table art, and they might stretch their definition a wee bit to include, say, a Mennonite rocker or an Amish quilt. Folk art is generally acceptable nowadays because it is encoded as "high craft" (especially if it takes the form of textiles, glassware or ceramics) as opposed to the "low craft" randomly scattered on tabletops at yard sales, auctions, church bazaars, cake sales and the like. Yet unfunded ("low") crafts of all kinds are being created at an exponentially growing rate all over the country. They are generally unheralded and unnoticed by the arts press, omitted by Dan Rather and company from the evening news, and dumped into the same informational black hole (the quasar site for unwanted data) that contains the ubiquitous little theater groups, low-circulation literary magazines, and independent creative writing collectives and support-groups. No reliable census of these arts and crafts practitioners even exists; they survive and even thrive below the sweeping radar line of the art world's official screen, meriting not so much as a blip — or a dollar — when reckoning time arrives, whether in the form of grant money, documentaries or col-

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been repainted and tuck-pointed. New windows gleam, colorful canvas awnings puff out like sails, and the whole place is a perfect example of "adaptive re-use," a prime tenet of the new architectural credo. There is an Amish kitchen on the premises (Arthur, the heart of Amish country, is only a few miles distant), with whitecapped matrons doling out hefty portions of homemade noodles, braised pork chops, green salad with sweet and sour dressing, blackberry cobbler and strong coffee. I shall leave those culinary arts to another commentator, however, and pull myself away to focus instead on the ancient schoolrooms turned into showplaces for antique reproductions, Amish tables, scented candles, "antique" greeting cards in favored tones of sepia and sienna, and abundant local crafts, including odd sign boards with a single leaf or flower captioned Thyme or Sweet William.

Having spent the last few days (and weeks) brooding on the themes of Class and Technology, I amble over to the display of painted saw blades and stand dumbly before a particularly interesting example. It is a cross-cutting saw about five feet long with raised walnut handles, perhaps 80 or 90 years old (maybe older) — the kind of tool a father and son might have used to saw chunks of pond ice or river ice into neat blocks for stacking and storage in the icehouse. Those clear and unpolluted blocks were stored for later use, making possible the sweet summery pleasures of hand-cranked ice cream and oversized tumblers of lemonade, all the more enjoyable in the days before air-conditioning or even electric fans.

Already, I am starting to register the implications of Class and Technology in this artifact now become a salable piece of art. This painted saw was once a working tool put to daily use, anchored to a particular niche in history, and still an authentic symbol of the working class. I am no Marxist, but clearly the artist is implying something by choosing to use a tool in this way — a rather special twist on the meaning of "adaptive re-use."

The saw testifies eloquently for the Old Ways (pre-electric and, more important, pre-electronic); it is old technology given new life. In a world of high-tech surfing on the Net, this rusty old gap-toothed thing persists in all its low-tech glory. Its original owner was some yeoman farmer, most likely, a weathered fellow with callused hands and dirty nails. There isn't anything obvious to suggest Baby Boomer or Yuppie values in this odd old implement, yet it exerts a powerful attraction on these very groups, apparently meeting needs not fulfilled by the ergonomically correct world in which they try to unwind.

The saw has been painted in four seasonal panels, beginning on the left with botanically correct redbud trees bursting into magenta flowers, and ending on the right with a refrigerator-white winter scene of Zen-like stillness. In between one sees depictions of plowing, harvesting, haying — in short, the agricultural world of hard manual labor, performed out of doors, the world most familiar to Americans until the decade after World War I when farmers, by the millions, took to their Tin Lizzies and headed for the Big City.

In a flash, I saw the black plywood silhouettes as the ghostly survivors of this idealized world. They could live with two-dimensionality in the form of scenery on saw blades and unusable birdhouses because everything in their world was purely symbolic, after all. They had once possessed the Platonically perfect homestead that we moderns deconstructed about the time phrases like "quality time" and "latchkey children" appeared on the scene.

We became profoundly and genuinely nostalgic, a word that derives from the Greek nostos or "homecoming." And the only homecoming available was through art. This variety of nostalgia was existential in origin, and hence it could not be satisfied by the instant nostalgia offered by made-for- TV movies or superficial documentaries of sports figures, movie stars and the like. So no one had to inform the unfunded artists that there would be authentic interest in their work; they already knew that in their bones.

In a flash, I saw the black plywood silhouettes as the ghostly survivors of this idealized world. They could live with the two-dimensionality in the form of scenery on saw blades and unusable birdhouses because everything in their world was purely symbolic, after all.

In this Postmodern Era, academics, politicians and social reformers have opened the cultural doors to all comers, while innumerable people have devised some ways to "come out" of whatever closet restricted their lives (marriage, occupation, sexual orientation). So can't the art establishment, in this spirit of openness and inclusion, offer an official entree to our local and independent artists, those low fliers coming in, even now, just below the radar? 

Dan Guillory, an English professor at
Millikin University in Decatur, is a former member of the Literature Arts Panel of the Illinois Arts Council. He is a contributor to Illinois Issues and the author of Living with Lincoln: Life and Art in the Heartland, The Alligator Inventions and When the Waters Recede. He is also the author of the Introduction to the new University of Illinois Press edition of Madeline Smith's Lemon Jelly Cake.

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