Object lesson

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Robin, Steve & I recently visited NYC’s Marlborough Gallery, eager to view Through the Moon Door an exhibition of French architect and artist Therry Despont’s painting & sculpture.  What I found was unexpected: An object lesson regarding the power of the object.

Object lesson:  A lesson taught (especially to young children) using a familiar or unusual object as a focus; an example that typifies a principle.

Most interesting were Despont’s creature “sculptures” created from found objects, including calipers, pliers, wrenches, saws, scythes, scrapers, spanners and what not.  Compositions cleverly formed where the finished product has no relation to its component pieces, the sculpture recognizable as a simulacrum of a living creature.  Inexplicably and unexpectedly, I found myself filled with anger at the artist who in his hubris had hijacked these objects and put them to such an unnatural use.

Clearly, art is an object-based activity, where the product is a man-made artifact like a painting or sculpture.  The traditional function of the artist’s canvas was to act as a “window upon the world”.  What happens to art when the artwork is about the object, composed of a collection of objects and images preexisting in the real world?

Assemblage:  (1) a collection of persons or things; gathering  (2) the act of assembling; the state of being assembled  (3) an artistic composition made from scraps, junk, and odds and ends (as of paper, cloth, wood, stone, or metal).  Assemblage is strictly three-dimensional.

I surprised myself by the depth of my outrage. As I struggled to decipher my emotions I realized my concern was for the objects themselves.  The tools, some of them obviously vintage or antique, were the product of and conduit for mankind’s creative power. This saw and hammer may have been used to build a house, that blade and scraper to carve wood, the wrench and spanner to tune a car.

These objects had been sanctified by their creative use and anointed with the craftsman’s sweat.  By assembling them into an assemblage the tools had been unsanctified and wiped clean, divorced from their creative heritage. Sterile and meaningless, they are then bolted, glued, screwed and hammered into unnatural configurations.

Steve saw none of this. Instead he extolled the artist’s skill in assembling these divergent bits into a new and meaningful whole.  “Look how the curve of the caliper captures and accentuates the beetle’s leg!”  “How cleverly the artist assembled plow handle, wooden yoke and scythe into a bird-like creature!”

And he was right. Instead of using the traditional means of paint and brush, or hammer and chisel, Despont uses fragments from the physical world to create art.

Despont draws upon the historical practice of bricolage and its forms of collage, montage and assemblage. An ancient technique, the genesis of modern assemblage can be traced to Braque, Picasso, and other Cubists who adopted the technique of collage and made it into fine art, pasting fragments of commercially-printed ephemera into their paintings and works on paper. Dadaists and Surrealists carried on the collage tradition.  Ernst, Arp, Duchamp, Schwitters, and Magritte embraced collage’s ability to bring together unrelated images into their paintings.

Bricolage evolved into more than an artistic style: It became a system for perceiving and processing the world around us. By juxtaposing unconnected and incongruous images and objects the artist creates art layered with meaning, full of feeling, humorous or disturbing, invocative and always thought provoking.

Collage is a technique of creating a pictorial composition either in two dimensions or in low relief by attaching various papers (blank, textured, or printed), photos, fabrics, assorted materials, and small objects to a canvas, board, or panel. A collage can be a piece of art in itself or it can be combined with painting, printmaking, drawing, or other two-dimensional techniques.

Assemblage enlarges collage into three dimensions and allows the artist to deliberately bring together individual three-dimensional objects into ensembles.  And watch what happens:  Recognizable objects bring with them the weight of perceptual and emotional content.

Despont’s assemblages are clever and amusing architectural constructs and yet fall short in manifesting the full power of bricolage.  By gathering together images and objects the bricoleur can present metaphors, create symbolic associations, expose emotions and convey messages for which there are no words.

Joseph Cornell was a New Yorker and premier assemblagist who elevated bricolage to a major art form.  Cornell was fascinated with objects and their associations, scouring the thrift stores of NYC and the beaches of Long Island for found objects that he arranged into boxed assemblages, glass-enclosed and viewed like windows into another reality.  Cornell relied upon the nostalgic appeal of objects and the impact of irrational juxtaposition.

Untilted (Cockatoo with Watch Faces), about 1949, Joseph Cornell

Let’s return to my original question:

Q:  What happens to art when the artwork is about the object, composed of a collection of objects and images preexisting in the real world?
A:  The art becomes seemingly infused with contextual meaning, energy and emotional content.

By now it’s obvious that the power of the object is no power at all, that aesthetic power is not inherent in things.  Rather the authority is applied by the viewer and reveals much about how the viewer values the object.  Our observations reveal and foreground our own aesthetic sensibilities.  In other words, valuing the object tells us nothing about the object itself; rather, it tells us how we value the object in relation to other objects.  Our reactions reveal more about ourselves than about the objects we value.

The objects and images we value and display speak volumes about what we value, who we are, how we perceive the world around us, and what we believe.

Postscript:  The spirit of bricolage continues to inform contemporary art as scanners, digital images and computers supplement the traditional artist tools of brush and palette knife, hammer and chisel.  Stay tuned for more posts on this fascinating subject.

Post Postscript:  Yes, you’re right, bricolage is conceptual art and I’ve been openly critical of much of contemporary conceptual art.  But good conceptual art can be very good.

Post Post Postscript:  Ok, ok, you’re right again.  Despont’s assemblages aren’t sculptures, but it’s an easy label to use.

Post Post Post Postscript:  I finally deciphered those feelings of outrage concerning Despont’s cavalier treatment of vintage tools.  Like me, many bricoleurs are collectors, and collectors assign objects special value and meaning.

~MadSilence the Smarter

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Tags: assemblage, bricolage, bricoleur, collage, Joseph Cornell, Therry Despont