At Baltimore’s Visionary Museum, a visually dense show featuring outsider art

The universalist, difference-eroding attitude toward all art glimpsed in this show hearkens back to a time when all cultures were viewed through the lens of Western tradition — when Henri Rousseau, the famed self-taught modern painter, created fantasy images of jungles at the edges of France’s empire base on nothing more than taxidermied animals and colonialist fever-dreams. It’s a romantic, exoticizing approach that is bound to lead to misunderstandings and over-simplifications.

An ancient Mayan codex and a bunny rabbit made entirely out of bottle caps don’t exist for the same reasons.

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(Photo by Exploratorium's Tinkering Studio) - ’Rolling Through the Bay,’ by Scott Weaver, 1974-2008, toothpicks. Collection of the artist.

(Photo by Dan Meyers) - ’Flustered Rustics,’ by J.J. Cromer, 2007, mixed media. Permanent Collection of the American Visionary Art Museum, Gift of J.J. and Mary Cromer.

And, yet, despite this broad-brush approach to all art everywhere, there’s no denying the appeal of Hoffberger’s infectious energy and the bold, distinctive aesthetics of the museum’s displays. Many of the artworks on view look perfectly at home in this environment — and it’s hard to imagine them functioning anywhere else.

Scott Weaver’s “Rolling Through the Bay,” for example, is a marvelous misfit object: It’s a nine-foot-tall, eight-foot-wide, roughly-three-foot-deep sculpture made entirely out of toothpicks and Elmer’s glue. Weaver has been working on the piece for at least 34 years — starting when he was 14.

The piece is intensely autobiographical and serves as a love letter to the artist’s home town — San Francisco. Every aspect of the city’s skyline and surrounding landscape is represented somewhere in the tangle of spires, bridges and houses.

The piece was designed with 11 entry points where table tennis balls can be inserted so that they descend long, snaking ramps; the balls take various tours through all of the sculpture’s zones, winding their way to the bottom over the course of a minute or more. Windmills and ferris wheels actually turn as the balls pass through features such as the Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina District, BART trains and the buildings of Chinatown. All of these sites are lovingly rendered, hidden within the labyrinthine sculpture.

Part boardwalk attraction, part lifelong obsession, part hermit tinkerer’s secret pride and joy, “Rolling Through the Bay” is unclassifiable. Yet the day it arrived at the Visionary Museum, having been driven cross-country by the artist himself, it had come home. Whatever unresolved issues regarding the definition and proper presentation of outsider art are raised by the Visionary Museum’s practices, the experiences it offers simply cannot be found anywhere else.

All Things Round: Galaxies, Eyeballs & Karma

Through Sept. 2, 2012, at the American Visionary Art Museum, 800 Key Hwy., Baltimore, MD. More information at www.avam.org.