Assemblage and Digression

I did not see and admittedly did not pay much attention to “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,” show at the New Museum a couple years back. I did not see my work as non-monumental, particularly "object" focused or "assemblage" based in intention, even if I used non-art materials like dry wall, window screen, newspaper, etc.. along with traditional art materials to create elements that were arrayed in spaces.

I cared for what the identity of materials lent to artwork, though I may not always have thought in quite those precise terms. Dry wall has function and connotation and that which it can simulate - broken wall, artifact. I started using it because of that simulated and potential for actual artifact quality, and because it could be dilapidated. I stopped using it because it was too easily dilapidated and difficult to port. Likewise, window screen and newspaper have functions and connotations and that which each can simulate.

Materials can be played with subverted. Whatever material in use (usually a single or confined number of related materials) I explored drawing/painting conventions with the material in space - arrangement of elements into wholes in the context of the physical space/site. I focused less per se on the "objects" that the "drawings" with the materials become, except literally as an artifact of the process and as elements for extending the process.

An artifact is an object, a drawing is an object. Even as it remains drawing based, my work has moving further toward what cannot be denied to be assemblage, even if it came from drawing. Classifications are hard; I'm inclined to try to straddle them and stay in between. One ends up circling back, which has me looking back at "assemblage" historically as an art strategy.

Today, I came across Roberta Smith's NYTimes review of Unmonumental. She writes, among other observations:

• "The thesis here is that assemblage-type sculpture, rampant at the moment, may also be today’s most viable art form. Why? It tends to be low-tech, modest in scale, made with found objects and materials and structured in ways that are fragmented if not actually disintegrating. Its ugly-duckling looks, rough edges, disparate parts and weird juxtapositions help stave off easy art-market absorption while also reflecting our fearful, fractured, materially excessive times back at us."

What happens, then, when "assemblage" doesn't have ugly duckling looks, rough edges, disparate parts, etc. -- none of which have to be part and parcel with assemblage. The assemblage of pieces adds up to an object, solid or fragile, beautiful or ugly, etc., either way, but to a different narrative.

Smith also writes:

• "The main idea here seems to be to make art that looks like art only on careful examination, guided by the assumption that everything, every detail, is intentional and meaningful. The disheveled surfaces may often say Rauschenberg, but Joseph Cornell’s delicate precision is frequently the more useful analogy.

Note, she focuses her characterization as one of guidance on "the assumption" that each detail matters, rather than one in which each detail actually matters or was considered, intentional or meaningful.

Though not using words about what is assumed in seeing art as art, Steven Stern in Frieze, reviewing the same show, seemed to observe no assumed intentionality and deliberateness, other than perhaps packaging and mockery:

• "Industrial fabrication, precious materials, the well-made object – all these were obviously jettisoned. But so too were inherited signifiers of anti-aesthetic value. That is to say, there was no ‘specialness’ conferred by the use of vernacular material: the bits of pop-cultural detritus weren’t glorified as ‘ready-mades’, the adoption of borrowed images didn’t feel like ‘appropriation’. For the artists in the show all this was business as usual, a simple matter of using all the crap that’s around."

• "There is a sense that the New Museum is adopting a similar winking, referential, faux denial: the message ‘This is not a museum’ seems to hover behind their recent moves. Whatever else ‘Unmonumental’ was, it was a canny exercise in marketing, an advertisement for the spirit of the organization. However much one wants to believe in that spirit, it is slightly alarming how slickly they are promoting their unslickness."

Use of "all the crap available" hardly seems an unnatural expansive end point for "intention" defining "ready mades" as art, though not a necessary one, since "intention" would seem to imply a means of selection. Making work out of what is available does not have to denigrate art or amount only to an ironic statement on art or preciousness of art. There are times and frames of mind when I have stopped, looked around, and become acutely aware that every random thing seen looks like "art." Also, what does it mean to feel borrowed: does appropriation have to be selective to feel borrowed or appropriated? Is a "feeling" of borrowing even necessary to appropriation as a strategy?

I've digressed. A use "all the crap" sentiment, however precisely or legitimate, is not what my work is about, as the identity of the materials used matters.

Coming back to assemblage, all the same questions one has for painting, sculpture, and so forth apply: formal or conceptual, traditional or experimental, cohesive or disjunctive.... Installation work is a conglomeration of assemblages, which are a conglomeration of materials, which rely on 2-D and 3-D perceptions and conventions.