The Polk has collected a vivid, uneven assortment of collages by respected artists and arranged them to reveal a tantalizing pattern.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published October 12, 2003
[Image courtesy the Polk Museum of Art ]
Robert Rauschenberg, Booster, 1967, color lithograph and silk screen on paper.
Collage: such an innocuous word, one we associate with small hands in elementary school art class. But in its cut-and-paste origins during the early 20th century were the sparks that fueled the engine of much Western culture since then.
It's the idea of appropriation. Think of Aaron Copland, who based Appalachian Spring on a Shaker song, and Eric Satie, who crashed jarring noises into his melodies; they presaged composers such as John Cage and a generation of hip-hop musicians. James Joyce in prose and T.S. Eliot in poetry inserted so many literary references that concordances were necessary to figure them out, paving the way for authors and poets as different in style as Tom Wolfe and James Merrill. And when Pablo Picasso started sticking snippets of "found" things like newspaper onto his canvases in the early 1900s, he became the progenitor of Andy Warhol.
"Some Assembly Required: Collage Culture in Post-War America," now at the Polk Museum of Art, examines the ethos of collage as a concept rather than a process. Modest in size but full of important names, the exhibition builds its case by juxtaposing obvious examples by artists such as Joseph Cornell and Romare Bearden with those that seem superficially like anomalies - one of Cindy Sherman's photographic self-portraits, for instance, and a mesmerizing short film by Zoe Beloff that takes you into dark, ruined rooms in which she has inserted cutout figures and strange, ghostly photographs. What they all share is a fascination with our image-soaked culture and all the detritus it throws our way, the "stuff" of our lives, and a collagist approach to organizing it in some way.
Some artists here serve forth all that stuff like the turkey dressed up on its Thanksgiving platter. Robert Heinecken squashes and twists magazine ads into a relief collage, Shiva Manifesting as a Single Mother, that has a smiling, many-handed mom juggling lots of domestic balls. Like a few other works in the show, it's obvious and facile.
Some works occupy a middle ground, wherein they lack profundity but sure are nice to look at. Lane Twitchell cuts paper into an elaborate, three-dimensional doily for The Sun of Winter Solstice (Motovu No. 3), with spikes radiating from a mandala center. The whole thing seems to whirl like a sherbet-colored gyre.
So many other collages suggest movement, too, especially the photo montages that deliver cryptic narratives. Blue Hands, Mike and Doug Starn's homage to Alfred Stieglitz's photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe's hands, ramps up the delicate eroticism of those earlier prints in a sexually charged scene. Miriam Schapiro's Explode is a montage of fabric swatches spinning out-of-control from a yellow vortex into a red void, zippy colors belying impending chaos. As a child in the school tour I stumbled into remarked: "It looks like the washing machine has broken." I can't offer a better analogy.
The Cornell box, a precious and mysterious assemblage of found objects suggesting the theme of exploration and discovery, and Rauschenberg's Booster, a print, are among the best works in the exhibition, and you could consider them as the good cop/bad cop dialogue arguing traditional collage versus its less conventional brethren. Cornell's place in the show is easy to see; Rauschenberg's is harder because he's represented by a print rather than some of his better known "combines" such as those involving a goat wrapped in a tire or a chicken as odalisque. What Rauschenberg does - as James Rosenquist does, too, in another print on view - is appropriate images rather than objects, transferring them onto paper in a sort of trompe l'oeil process that makes them look three-dimensional. It was a pretty huge idea in the 1960s, especially because Rauschenberg was so adept at combining such disparate (some would even say wacko) images into a brilliantly cogent visual metaphor. For Booster, the artist's own X-rays are stacked top to bottom to form a skeleton, surrounded by photographs of things like rockets, a leaping basketball star, a chair, all set on top of an astronomical chart. There's a lot going on and you begin to get it when you think about the word "boost."
Rauschenberg's experimentation made many of the other examples here possible, such as Ilene Segalove's Thank You, Illusion, which mines the same vein in a more personal way, and Barbara Kruger's in-your-face polemic, Untitled (Who Speaks?/Who is Silent?), both prints and both collages.
Robert Motherwell's spare, elegant Untitled takes the playfulness inherent in the idea of making a collage and subverts it with a somber wash of tombstone beige slashed with black ink and a smear of blue, all connected by a torn strip of red paper bearing the message, "Nothing in human life is more to be lamented than that a wise man should have so little influence." The randomness of the torn scrap is at odds with the portentous words, a Greek tragedy waiting for Godot. Or maybe just an ironic epitaph for the George Babbitts of the world.
The gamesmanship of collage, the act of pushing things around until they look right, has a superficiality about it. And in some cases, it is art as maquillage, more about covering a surface than uncovering an idea. But that ought to be just fine with us since we're no strangers to coverups; they're part of our collective history. Collages are collectives of history, too, summations of parts that are sometimes more, sometimes less than the whole picture. Whatever that is.
