Once upon a time Herb Rieth traveled the country playing punk shows (and sometimes punk rock banjo!), even touring with Michelle Shocked with his old band the Pony Stars. Now he makes neo-apocalyptic fabric collages, wanders the earth in a paint-splattered hoodie, teaches drawing at the University of Alabama and laughs heartily at just about anything. Recently we spoke about outsider art, punk rock and his upcoming opening at L’Keg Gallery.Cheree: You organized the Left Fielders, didn’t you? Where did the name come from?

Herb: I don’t like taking full credit because I see it as more of a collaborative effort. Maybe that’s a bad thing on my part, maybe I lack business acumen…It Came From Left Field because I always feel myself as an outsider, and one of my favorite Hank Williams songs is Outside Looking In. Also, I like to use esoteric phrases. I love reading Thomas Wolfe, you know, the North Carolina one, and early Cormac McCarthy. They’re just rich with these beautiful turns of phrase, and old country music, oh my gosh—Lefty Frizzell, ‘dancing all over the place till the floor came up and hit me in the face.’ Old bluegrass and country, it’s just full of these folkisms, so there was Left Field. And I was never one to play solo guitar, but I love playing with a band, so you know someone’s got your back. I find three people is really good. Three is a magic number. A stool needs three legs to stand, with three people you’ve got your vendigram of commonalities.

C: What makes you an outsider?

H: Growing up as a nerd in the 70’s, I had glasses and I was really into drawing. I used to draw pictures of flying saucers and Sasquatch in fifth grade, sell them to my classmates for a quarter. And I did these really crazy bio-anthropological drawings of what Sasquatch looked like. I did the skulls and then I put flesh over them like I saw in National Geographic, so they were really anatomically correct, and then I did, ‘the fingernails are cracked from digging for roots’ and stuff…yeah, they were very scientific. In high school, I decided I was punk rock, and you know, punk rockers are not insiders…

 C: They might be now.

H: Yeah…but when I was in high school up in southern Indiana in ’83, we would get death threats, like I’m going to kill you, punker, from, we called them grits, the country kids. So that kind of continued the outsider thing. In a way it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it is true. I have a hard time conversing with normal people. What do you talk to them about—hi, how’s your mortgage? I don’t know what to say to you…and I was a left fielder when I was in Little League baseball…or maybe I was a right fielder. Anyhow, they’d stick me out where no one would hit, because I’d be spacing…

 C: How did you meet the other Left Fielders?

H: I was ostensibly on Jayson Triplett’s [Ming Donkey] graduate committee [as a professor at Mississippi State University] but as soon as I saw his work, I recognized a kindred spirit. I can offer criticism for that and I know grad speak, I can go into it reflexively, but at the same time, the qualities in his work were there. It was everything I liked. It had its finesses and crudenesses and its own vocabulary. It’s something I recognize immediately. It says a lot about punk rock and D.I.Y. and it has its own paradigm of completeness. There’s this polished intellectual art that’s out there, and I don’t care much for that, it’s too complete for me. There’s no place for me to wiggle into. But I can inhabit Jayson’s work easily.

Jason Baldwin, he was one of my mom’s students [at the University of Mississippi], so we got introduced and ended up rooming together at art conferences. He was into skateboarding and punk rock culture, so we had commonalities. And then it just happened that he needed a job, and they had a position open [at Mississippi State]. I was like, hey, here’s a great guy, and they hired him.

C: Why do you think the Left Fielders’ aesthetic works well together?

H: It’s nice to have a community and people you can speak the same language to. Philosophically we might have talked about things a certain amount, but I feel like there’s some implicit conversations that go on with the work, and there’s not really anything I would criticize about either one of their art. It’s something I enjoy. It’s a good meal for me.

C: Has your work changed since the first Left Field exhibit in 2006?

H: Back then my work had a lot more subject. I was dealing with this character, it was almost a kind of cartoon character called the Hermetic Enigma. It was this guy in a 50’s space suit and the Hermetic Enigma was kind of me, where I was separated by this huge clunky spacesuit. It was this face-plate, how you only see people behind windshields. If somebody honked, you might recognize their car before you recognized them, and everybody’s on the cell phone so everybody’s kind of got this remove, and that’s how I felt. Plus, having watched all of those monster movies and early Flash Gordon, like 30’s Flash Gordon, it was all there. And everybody was like, oh your robot character, and I was like, no not robot, spacesuit. Person in space suit is me.  And so it had a narrative, and worked in a similar way to Jayson’s [Ming] work. I think his work has more of a socialist agenda—it has this kind of socialist sloganeering to it, except it’s been poetically subverted—and mine tends to be more personal, but they function in a similar way.

Jason Baldwin stakes out another kind of territory altogether, where his interface with popular culture makes a personalized biography. But we’re still kind of exploring the fact that we absorbed a lot through comic books and cartoons. All of us were goobers I think, and we were into alternative culture, and we were kind of backwoods—I mean, we didn’t grow up in New York.

C: What about the work you’re doing now with fabric and safety pins?

H: The work I do now has kind of evolved from that character-driven narrative, and now the fabric is now a character. It speaks, you know? I’m taking a lot of the moves from cartoon culture—cartoons have a visual vocabulary right, so I’m trying to break that apart. Cartoon vocabulary is very didactic—you draw certain lines, and they represent a shadow here and a head here. I want to make that more abstract and the safety pins, you know, from punk rock culture, and a lot of the fabric I’m using comes from my clothes, which are still kind of based in that. I used to get huge holes in my jeans and repair those, and I had a leopard skin collar, and you always decorated your jackets, right? I had a Misfits jacket, I had my Screaming Youth Brigade jacket, I had my Hank Williams jacket with The Subhumans over the top, so there are these inherent contradictions in there too.

Both Jason Baldwin and Jayson Triplett, they have this kind of worn, it’s almost a reliquary or a fetish feel, where a piece has been worked and invested in, and it’s like where the corners get rounded on things that get used a lot. I hope that the cloth has that kind of fetishistic appeal as well.

C: So for you it’s about the fetish or the ritual?

H: I played in a punk rock band, and I was in art school at Vanderbilt of all places. You’d walk into class and the professor would be like, what are you going to do today, and I’d be like, oh I’m going to take this TV and make a stage prop out of it, and I would dumpster dive all of this plaster gauze from the medical school and we would make giant hands and gnashing teeth and sing ‘TV mind control, TV mind control’ and smash the TV. And I would get naked onstage, and one time this guy tried to stick a whip up my butt. It was lots of fun, you got to make your own costumes. You just did shit because why not, what the hell?

I think punk rock culture or alterna-culture has—had—that kind of [fetish] feel too, because you couldn’t buy that stuff. You could buy spiked wristbands but you had to make most of it, and in making your costume, you invested it with secret powers. I’ll talk to my classes, and I’ll say well, what is camouflage? Camouflage is hunter magic. And they’d be like huh, and I’ll be like, come on, you’re making yourself invisible, its magic!

Punk rock culture is just the opposite. Instead of making yourself invisible, you make yourself ultra-visible. I got kicked out of high school for having the slogan ‘stand up, stick out or fuck off’ on my jacket, and eventually I taped over the ‘fuck off’ because I did want to be a good boy and finish high school. But it’s about being visible and manifesting that stuff.

C: So when you started, punk rock made you an outcast and outsider art was really outsider. Do you think this is still the case?

H: Well, it’s an interesting question. When I worked [with a gallery] in Chicago I got to see a lot of Howard Finster, and we’d go out to the suburbs, and it’s the rich people who had Howard Finster in their houses, it wasn’t the poor people. But Howard Finster, from what I gather, was the very salt of the earth himself. And so it has been elevated, but I think there’s this new generation that has this slickness to it, and I feel I must combat that. Apple designs beautiful things and I want them on a very superficial level. There’s this kind of breeziness to the conversation, oh I’m just blogging this, and you know, I don’t want to go back to where you had to make zines, and I don’t want to say, oh we were better than, because that’s not true. It was just different then.

There’s this line in the Art 24 with Margaret Killgallen, where she’s talking about how she wants her hand to be visible. I want my hand to be visible! Maybe that’s a romantic notion, that we can have a voice in this world, but I’m not going to stop till I’m heard, even though you think I’m too old, it’s too late. There’s all these things against you, but that just makes you want to fight harder. It’s the old punk rock thing. Someone yells, you stink, you say, wanna come up here and smell me?

C: You realized long ago that you would never fit in, so you decided to revel in outsider culture?

H: If Pace Wildenstein called me up, I’m not going to turn down an exhibition. I’ve got a family to feed, I’m the man now. I’m the one making the assignments and giving people F’s, I’m that asshole. There are people that fight their whole lives. They have way more chutzpah than I ever will. But I like to think that I disperse my subversion in other ways. I’m not going to give my class a straight up assignment, I’m going to ask all these questions…They’re like little time bombs, 5 years from now they’re going to explode in your pocket. I feel like I’m doing my subversive bit that way, by being an educator. The other thing I realize is, all of these people talking about how art is supposed to communicate and change live, come on. If artists really wanted to change lives, they would be working in manga.

C: Do you think artists have a responsibility to the society at large?

H: No, they’re selfish. They’re selfish, but they do serve a function. Where would society be without people to adore and yet revile? With music, it’s the same thing—oh that person died of a drug overdose, oh kids today, but your Brian Joneses and your Kurt Cobains are your scapegoats, quite literally. You stick the millstone around their neck and those are the problems of the community. Then you throw them out in the desert to die and take the curse away. You need that goat.