My conclusion is that Wiley is impossible to classify.  One might ask, “But is he mainstream?”  He’s better than that.  He is one of the most important artists to challenge the very notion of “Mainstream” art.  His work has already added a great deal to art, his inventiveness, his laid-back wit, his humanistic humor.  He has helped open up art to all kinds of personal expression that the modernist academy had forbidden.  His daring art has been of enormous influence.

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            It is becoming more and more apparent that he is a major artist.  His seriousness is in no way undercut by his quirky, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes paradoxical vision.  In fact, this vision is at the center of his art.  Those smiles his works so often cause are smiles of recognition, smiles of glee.  The foibles and the homey triumph that he chronicles – in a grand flood of images, objects, textures, markings and words – signify personal artistic release.

            He is now a living master of detail.  His parts, doodles, asides, brush strokes and arcing lines form dense – yet permeable – magma-like flows of pleasure and meaning.  Whole worlds form, dislocate, form again and dissolve into new wholes.  He never lets you get carried away in this detail, however.

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            His is an unaccountable, very in-control out-of-control controlness: a sort of jazzed-up Jackson Pollack ‘all-overness.’  His scribbly tendrilly graffiti-like line is singular in post-war American art.  Pollack removed his hand, Wiley revels in his.

His influence as a teacher is incalculable.  Bruce Nauman, a now-famous former student of Wiley’s at U.C. Davis, calls him the “strongest influence I had.”

            “It was in being rigorous, being honest with yourself – trying to be clear – taking a moral position,” Nauman says.

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            Wiley is so inventive, prolific, and influential that writers in their wild attempts to put a handle on Northern California art use him as a nomenclature bank: “Pop Western,” “Dude Ranch Dada” (Hilton Kramer, New York Times), “Metaphysical Funk” (John Perreault, Village Voice), “Bay Region Mythmakers” (Thomas Albright, Art News).

            But Wiley resists either leading or following a “movement” classifiable by critics.  His is the irreverent spirit of Duchamp, the poltergeist in the Zeitgeist.  If anyone gets anywhere close to defining him, he transubstantiates.

            Wiley is himself the greatest work of art he ever created, and to know him is to know everything in his art and vice-versa.  There is a real paradox in both his life and his art, between being totally knowable and forever seeming unknowable.  Everything about Wiley is both more simple than it would appear, and more complex.  “I am my own enigma,” he says, a statement which is not meant to be enigmatic at all, but a statement of fact and clarity about being alive.  Nothing is really hidden in Wiley’s work; all meaning is present on the surface and is direct and unselfconscious.  Wiley’s art is a gift that reminds us of the wonder and miracle of it all – it helps us to see with a new calm what has always been there, and to treasure the strangeness and beauty and openness of it.

            Wiley’s art flows from a fertile foundation of imagination which is governed by abstract intuitions and concrete rules of order.  Within the broad spectrum of his paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptural assemblages, meanings and insistently privatized symbols pile rhythmically one over the other.  Within this tangle of contexts, individual parts cannot be readily separated from the whole.  Wiley’s discourse, fabricated as a series of real-world notes on an abstract field, relies on establishing a symmetry between public and private, abstract and representational.  Wiley’s penchant for note-taking and mapmaking takes on a larger function, serving as a means of analyzing the ambiguous nature of contemporary society.  While his repeated use of personal signs and symbols – drawn from such diverse sources as musical notation, ancient Roman icons, hobo symbols, the I-Ching, tarot and playing cards, and the signifiers of popular culture – is a method of incorporating content within pictorial form, it is also a way of providing location cues for psychological meditations that lack commonly accepted road markers.

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            A key element of Wiley’s art is the idea of a multiple perspective on any given subject.

            Well, true and not true.  Wiley’s work is studded with coded references, but it does go somewhere.  In fact, it refuses to stay still.  Restlessness is one of its most appealing properties, the conviction that every thought can be (and often is) challenged, pulled like taffy into a dense and chewy dialogue.

            Various thinkers have had an impact on Wiley, and in this sense he is the ultimate student, as he willingly absorbs ideas that have gained his respect and guided him in art and life.  In an interview that I conducted with the artist on Halloween Day 2002, he quoted several authors.  These thinker/writers, who include Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Paul Virilio, and Howard Zinn, have, like Wiley, been working for thirty or forty years.  It is their early work that binds Wiley to the community of alternative voices.  He also mentioned classics: José Ortega y Gassell’s The Revolt of the Masses, originally published in 1930, and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by John Reps and Nyogen Senzaki – both texts widely circulated when Wiley was a young artist.  Through these writings a viewer can access a larger set of thoughts, ideas, and sensibilities pertaining to Wiley’s ruminations.  These texts that have come to represent, even more clearly now in retrospect, a way of living in truth, goodness, beauty, and honesty. 

            The musings of Mr. Wiley spurt out from some unique and special sacred place.  The radio spits out the day’s news, the grim bearer of the outside world.  Wiley filters, with a wise glance backward, and while he peers forward, his images freshly guide us to the next chapter.  With the wisdom of the acute observer of things, he mixes fact with fantasy, daily life with explosions, history with picture books.  Each time, a moment of invention is tied to the daily unraveling of history, bound together through an interconnectedness afforded by Zen teachings – detachment and love in everything, inside everything.

            Wiley long ago adopted a stage persona, Mr. Unatural, in order to orchestrate his “ensemble” pieces.

            Wiley’s character suggests a vaudevillian who, having lost his natural stage, must undertake the construction of another.  Like Will Rogers, Mr. Unatural is a homespun western philosopher, a man who chooses to seem awkward or unsophisticated in order to set up his delivery.  And like Roy Rogers, Wiley has married his horse (his art) to his life.  Addressing us as intimates, sometimes as coconspirators, Wiley is willing to take both a bow and a fall on the seat of his pants if these can establish authoritative dimensions for his monolog.

            William Wiley is an artist who fashions factual reality within a visual universe of his own design.  No matter how distinct or diverse the ingredients, the artistic dish he prepares is of his own recipe.  Secure in this realization of his individuality, Wiley has been able to allow his imagination to roam from the back pages of alchemical texts to the front pages of today’s newspapers in search of inspiration.  Museums and art books are also natural and necessary resources.

            For Wiley, the art of the past is not something to be envied or ignored.  It is, instead, alive and vibrant with vast creative possibilities to be played off of in one’s own art.  Wiley is not alone in this sensibility.  For example, in 1935, Pablo Picasso wrote, “A picture lives a life like a living creature, undergoing the changes imposed on us by our life from day to day.  This is natural enough, as the picture lives only through the man who is looking at it.”

            The use of direct commentary on earlier art by Wiley goes back to 1967, a year of personal revelation and artistic breakthrough when he realized that he could draw, paint, and sculpt without regard to critical opinion.  Mona Lisa Wipe Out or ‘Three Wishes,’ 1967, takes on one of the great icons of Western art and transforms it into another section of Wiley’s world.

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Take an object.  Do something to it.

Do something else to it.

Jasper Johns

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            Unlike the collector, curator, or critic who judges a work in its entirety, artists often seize upon details or passages that interest, delight, or inspire them.  Artists often couldn’t care less about the whole, but only on how the light in one painting falls upon a table, or the juxtaposition of two colors in the corner of another.  Good artists scavenge – they feel no need to evaluate.

            The impossibility of pigeonholing painter William Wiley is evident in the range of sound bites critics use to describe his work.  He’s been called everything from the “Michelangelo of Funk” to a “dude ranch dadaist” to a “kinder, gentler Ted Kaczynski.”  Perhaps because his work is so sprawling, it’s tempting to try to coin the perfect phrase to encompass the opposites Wiley embraces.  Well, forget it.  I’m taking my time.

            Let’s start with appearances: Wiley’s paintings look like great big little kid’s drawings – but drawn by a really smart little kid who reads fairy tales and the Bible, is an ecological activist, knows the esoterics of Christian art and has a few theories about the origins of the universe.  Images and text are interwoven in an anachronistic tapestry.  Funky, homemade bar codes are plunked down next to alchemical symbols in maelstroms of charcoal enveloped by torrents of paint.  We see warring towers of Babel ; anvils – which are actually autobiographical emblems – to white-water rafting or sit in lonely moonlit skiffs.  Navajo blankets, St. Mark’s apocalyptic lion, whole universes, the works.

            Visionary, cosmological and autobiographical themes are typically “outsider” subjects, while insiders are supposed to content themselves with more cliquish subjects.  That’s why Wiley’s paintings, with their awkward enthusiasms, are such a conundrum.  They have the kind of obsessive, technophobic look of art that is trying to build a bridge between mystical enlightenment and interior decoration.

            Wiley’s work is like outsider art for insiders.  He is not some Appalachian coot carving soft-core statues, or a lost, institutionalized soul churning out obsessive brain vomit.

            We East-Coasters may chalk it up to Wiley’s Northern California hippie-ness, but we eat it up whole.  Why?  Because in Wiley’s work we are let in on the outsider’s story.  His allusions are a little bookish, though no less charming for being urbane and knowing.  In fact, they’re better for being honestly sophisticated as opposed to slavishly unspoiled.  Purity – even in madness – can be a little dull.

            Outsiders tend to be one-note artists standing on street corners madly hollering about the end of the world.  Wiley is transmitting his messages on more frequencies.

            Looked at in this light, some may find him too stylist – and therefore easy to dismiss.  But that is what art is for.

            Artists take the things we all can see and show us the possibilities we couldn’t see.  They shouldn’t be fenced into the tiny acreage of what we fashionably call “appropriate” or “authentic.”  Like Wiley, they should be encouraged to go outside.