Richard Sharpe Shaver... Master Surrealist
by Brian Tucker
Inside the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Orange, California
Richard
Sharpe Shaver stands at the center of several art exhibits that I've
put together, beginning in 1989. Longtime Shavertron
aficionados might recall "Richard Shaver, Darling of the Art
World," which I wrote for the print edition of Shavertron, issue 29, on the occasion of the first presentation of Shaver's
work in a New York art gallery back in 1991.
Shaver has been featured in more art shows in the years
since that article, and I'm delighted to bring readers of the online
Shavertron up to date.
My first Shaver-related show was "The Hidden
World," an exposition of the life and work of Richard Shaver and
his publisher Ray Palmer. Taped audio narration guided viewers
through an array of historical photos, maps, magazines and rocks in
display cases. These artifacts were mixed with other elements that I
fabricated myself, including paintings, drawings, diagrams and
texts.
Click for Brian Tucker's Dero Art
The show's narration describes key episodes in Shaver's
career: Shaver claimed to have discovered the mother of all human
languages, the "Mantong" alphabet, which Palmer published
in a 1944 issue of Amazing Stories magazine. Palmer went on to
edit and publish a series of stories by Shaver, labeling them
"The Shaver Mystery," and characterizing Shaver's tales as
fact-presented-as-fiction. These stories told of the great Elder
Races who occupied the earth in pre-historic times. Those ancient
races, who were far more sophisticated than modern humans, built
tremendous cities inside the earth. Shaver wrote that the degenerate
descendants of those races - the sadistic inner-earth-dwellers known
as Dero - are still alive and spreading confusion and misery among us
today. Thousands of readers wrote letters to verify Shaver's claims
that these malevolent creatures use the Elder Race's ancient
"ray" machines to project tormenting voices and anti-social
impulses into the minds of helpless surface dwellers.
The show's narration also described the controversy
that surrounded the Shaver Mystery within the science fiction
community, and arguments between Shaver and Palmer over the reality
of the Dero and their cavern world. Palmer suggested that the Dero
existed on a spiritual or astral plane; Shaver, a strict materialist,
insisted they physically reside inside the earth. The show continued
with an exploration of Shaver's "rock books" - stones that
Shaver believed were manufactured by the Elder Races in order to
store information. Rock books were the only available record of the
true history of intelligent life on earth. The show concluded with a
display of drawings, photos, and paintings that Shaver created as
visual aids to make the images in the rock books accessible to modern
man.
While viewers unfamiliar with the saga of Shaver and
Palmer often wonder about the mix of fact and fiction in the exhibit
(some conclude I made the whole thing up), the facts of Shaver's
biography and his beliefs are presented as accurately as possible.
The first version, at California Institute of the Arts in 1989,
culminated with two framed paintings and a pastel drawing by Richard
Shaver.
An expanded version of "The Hidden World" was
presented in 1994 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in connection
with a show called "Altered Egos." This remains the most
extensive Shaver-themed exhibit yet mounted. It included more
original Shaver paintings, photos, and manuscripts than before, plus
an audio interview with Shaver, and a Long John Nebel radio broadcast
featuring Shaver and Palmer. Additional historical items included an
original copy of the seventeenth century book Mundus
Subterraneus by the legendary Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher.
The book features engravings depicting inner-earth dwellers and
images that Kircher found embedded in rocks, much as Shaver did
centuries later.
Shaver's works appeared in a different context in the
latest show that I assembled, in 2002 - "A Little Application of
Our Much-Touted Know-How," at the Guggenheim Gallery of Chapman
University, Orange, California. In this show, Shaver was placed among
a group of people who have used artistic means to demonstrate unusual
theories.
In addition to pieces by Shaver, the show featured
drawings made in the process of clairvoyant "Remote
Viewing," including a likeness of the World Trade Center attack
that professional remote viewer Prudence Calabrese claims to have
drawn in 1997.
The show also featured examples of recorded speech
played forward and backward to illustrate the "Reverse
Speech" phenomenon discovered by Australian researcher David
John Oates. Oates believes that
people unconsciously communicate by speaking backwards, and that
reverse speech always reveals the speaker's true state.
Ghostly photographs by the Veilleux family of Maine
rounded out the show. Throughout the 1960s and '70s, the Veilleux
took mysterious Polaroids based on instructions received via Ouija
board. They believe these photos prove the existence of spiritual
life after physical death.
In "The Hidden World," Shaver's writing,
painting, and photography were folded into my own telling of his
story. In "Much-Touted Know-How," most of the supplementary
information in the gallery consisted of recordings or direct
quotations from those who produced the works on display. Shaver's
"voice" was present through a group of his annotated
photos.
Click for Annotated Photo by R. Shaver
These are standard sheets of typing paper on which
Shaver pasted a photographic print, usually a detail of a surface or
cross-section of rock. Sometimes he'd paste more than one photo on a
sheet, and sometimes he used colored inks or watercolors on the
photos to accentuate latent figures he discovered in the rock
books.
Beneath the photos he typed an interpretation of the
image he saw, or offered instruction in his photographic method, or a
lament about his frustration trying to get the press or the
scientific community to take his insights seriously. The show's title
was a quote from one of those pieces.
Another Annotated Photo
Although "The Hidden World" provided more
information about Shaver's career, "Much-Touted Know-How"
may have offered the best selection of Shaver's paintings and photos
thusfar presented to the public. This was largely due to the
cooperation of Shaver fans Richard Toronto and Jim Pobst, who were
crucial contributors to the earlier shows as well.
None of these works had, to my knowledge, ever been
exhibited before. In addition to the annotated and hand-colored
photos by Shaver, the show included two of the best known of Shaver's
creations. Shaver chose the painting "Amazons Defending Against
the Attack of the Ape Bats" to introduce his paintings to the
world in the book The Ancient Earth-Its Story in Stone, which
is included as part of Ray Palmer's The Secret World.
Click for Shaver's "Attack of the Ape
Bats"
Shaver frequently posed for pictures with the "Ape
Bats" painting - it was clearly a proud achievement - and I was
thrilled to be able to include it in the show.
Another remarkable piece is the large-scale drawing "After the Big
Flood" (aka "Adam and Eve in Space").
Shaver published an article interpreting this drawing
(Shaver called it a painting, but it seems to have been rendered in
pastel and felt pen) in an issue of The Hidden World, a
magazine devoted to Shaver's theories, published by Palmer in the
1960s. The "Adam and Eve" drawing was featured on the
cover. With written phrases, such as "this is writing,"
embedded among its images, it is an unusual example - unique, as far
as I know - of Shaver's transition from earlier drawings of life in
the caves to his larger-scale paintings based on rock
books.
Click for Adam and Eve in Space
Two other paintings were included in the show, both vivid examples of
the dense agglomeration of overlapping faces, body parts and animal
heads that Shaver often found in rock books. These two paintings are
reproduced elsewhere on the Shavertron website, with an
article by Doug Skinner.
A copy of The Secret World and several photocopied articles by
or about Shaver, including his essay on "Adam and Eve in Space," were
available at a reading area in the center of the Guggenheim gallery.
The show also included an internet connection with a direct link to
Shavertron.
We kicked off "Much-Touted Know-How" with a
panel discussion featuring Reverse Speech Practitioner Terese
Johnson, Skeptic magazine's publisher Dr. Michael Shermer, and
me. I gave an introductory talk about Shaver and the others in the
show.
Ms. Johnson, a close associate of David John Oates and
one of only two or three Reverse Speech professionals in the U.S.,
gave an impassioned presentation of her history with Reverse Speech
and the reasons she was convinced of its validity as a therapeutic
tool. Her talk ran longer than scheduled, so Dr. Shermer jumped in
and started to challenge her claims for Reverse Speech, which his
magazine had printed an article debunking.
Shermer eventually debunked the entire exhibit,
diagnosing Shaver's work as a "classic" example of the
human tendency to seek and find patterns, even where there are none.
Prudence Calabrese, the remote viewer whose precognitive image of the
World Trade Center attack was in the show, described the panel talk
in her review of the show for a Remote Viewing Newsletter (see the
web links below).
Press reaction to "Much-Touted Know-How" focused heavily on Shaver.
The widely-read LA Weekly usually limits its coverage to
cultural events in Los Angeles County, so I was pleasantly surprised
when art critic Doug Harvey traveled south to see the show and write
a full-page review.
Harvey was especially taken with the presentation of
Shaver's work, which he called "the most impressive portion of
the exhibit, both formally and conceptually." He went on to
compare Shaver to some of the best-known painters of the twentieth
century, and to wonder "why this fascinating work-which on
visual terms alone ranks with the Surrealist paintings of Max Ernst
and Jean Dubuffet-hasn't been afforded a more complete
retrospective."
Praise for Shaver arrived in somewhat less respectful
terms in a review that appeared in the LA Weekly's sister
publication, Orange County Weekly. Rebecca Schoenkopf saw the show as a meditation on the
stereotype of the crazy artist, describing the exhibit as
"brilliantly insane. It's fruity and cuckoo and downright
bananas." Pegging
Shaver as "a great nut," and "the looniest of them all," she found
that his work "revealed an evocative vision," exclaiming "he sure
made nice paintings out of what he saw in those rock
sections!"
The year 2002 also saw the first show of Shaver's work
that I had nothing to do with: "Richard Sharpe Shaver: Weird and
Wonderful Art," appeared at Christine Burgin Gallery in New York
City. Burgin is working with author and Shaver art collector Norman
Brosterman, and I understand that Doug Skinner, who has delivered a
number of well-researched lectures on Shaver over the years, spoke at
the show's opening. I was unable to see that show, but I heard good
things about it, and it was favorably reviewed in the New York
Times.
After decades of obscurity, there are signs of a
renewed public interest in Richard Shaver. I've heard rumblings about
Shaver being included in a New York museum exhibit, talk of a book
about Shaver, and I expect to present one or another of my
Shaver-related shows again at some point in the future, when I'll
have more news for the Shavertron faithful.
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Text and images copyright Brian Tucker. Used here by permission.
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