I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
My long-term dream as an artist has always been to create giant abstract acrylic paintings. Having done that, I’m evolving towards new forms of art: forms that I didn’t even know could be art.
I discovered assemblage as an approach through creating a book-based work for WCACO’s (Un)Altered Books show, now on display at the University of Denver’s Anderson Academic Commons.
For WCACO’s upcoming community spotlight at the Denver Art Museum, I made another assemblage, Surveillance. I used an old webcam I found at Goodwill, keys from an old computer keyboard of mine, and silver jewelry wire.
Famous assemblage artists
Before I started doing assemblage, I became familiar with Betye Saar’s work. She passed away in July at age 99 after a lifetime of making art for a living. Her work confronted stereotypes of Black people such as “mammies,” women hired to care for white children. Her most famous work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, featured a figurine of a large Black woman with a rifle, a grenade, and a broom.
Saar created this work in 1972 specifically for a show that invited Black artists to create art about Black heroes. Of this artwork, she wrote:
For many years, I had collected derogatory images: postcards, a cigar-box label, an ad for beans, Darkie toothpaste. I found a little Aunt Jemima mammy figure, a caricature of a Black slave, like those later used to advertise pancakes. She had a broom in one hand and, on the other side, I gave her a rifle. In front of her, I placed a little postcard, of a mammy with a mulatto child, which is another way Black women were exploited during slavery. I used the derogatory image to empower the Black woman by making her a revolutionary, like she was rebelling against her past enslavement.
Assemblage takes real-world items representing cultural reality and combines it in a way that it both expresses something aesthetically but also meaningfully. This is what I tried to do with my assemblage Love & Marriage that I made for the books show. I took old editions of classic literature featuring adulteresses, and combined them with modern word art expressing certain cultural tropes: Love Always, Get It Girl, Bedroom Rules.
I wanted to contrast cultural simplification of what it means to be in a romantic and sexual love relationship vs the nuanced complexities of the novels I included.
The new realism
Something that attracts me about assemblage is using real-world objects to say something, both decoratively but more importantly conceptually.
I’m attracted to the work of artist Arman (born Armand Fernandez in Nice, France in 1928). His Accumulations were collections of similar or repetitive objects — paintbrushes, matchbox cars, watches, instruments — which he arranged with transparent polyester castings or within plexiglas cases. He was part of the French Nouveau Réalisme group, formed in 1960 for “new ways of perceiving the real.”
The term “new realism” was coined by painter Jean Milhau in 1948: “A current is emerging which, without denying the achievements of modern culture and technology, denies the primacy of formal research, advocates a return to objective reality and to the subject, and emphasizes the social content of all reality.” Art critic Pierre Restany who founded the movement described what the nouveau realists were doing as a “poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality.” The new realists were acting somewhat in opposition to the expressionism and lyricism of abstract paintings, seeking a return to reality, and making it art even when presented as itself.
That is what interests me in assemblage: objective reality or more literally object-ive reality — the objects of reality — and the social content of them.
Abstraction to reality Redux
When I did my Snow Bound project, I went from abstraction to reality. I took abstract paintings, shot photos during a ski day at Keystone Resort, and then created digitally-edited photos inspired by the paintings. This de-abstraction process was my first effort as an artist at a return to reality.
Now with assemblage, I’m moving again in the direction of reality. I’m planning to do a series of Arman accumulations style pieces that use repetitive objects that I’ve found around my house during my decluttering. I’ve already gathered perfume bottles, reading glasses, carabiner clips, swim goggles, and self-storage locks and keys. My plan is to create art that is at once decorative and meaningful, saying something about the stuff of modern life with each piece.