ExIconoclast Assemblage Art
 

A Gleaner Gathers Her Thoughts and asks you To Come to the Table

 

The Where

I believe art begins in the unconscious, where art is “cooked.”  The raw ingredients are cleaned, peeled, chopped, crushed, carmalized, introduced and blended.  Being “present with art,” experiencing it without analyzing it is like getting into that deep pool of warm water.  But, art also needs our conscious minds to question, understand, and articulate what I/we knew/know unconsciously.  Art is that articulation.

 

The What

Assemblage art is an extended metaphor, using often incongruous, approximate materials to render the symbolic.  It is the opposite of virtual reality’s literalism - we no longer know how to imagine and are thus increasingly isolated from ourselves and others of our kind (Alan Watts).  

 

The How.      

“Your yard has always been full of trash.”  Trashpicker, hoarder, junker - “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely.”  When I find or see things I am inexplicably drawn to, art is leaving me a calling card - do I pick it up? (Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert).  The unconscious recognizes value.  Art is my act of faith, an investment, a taking up of what I don’t yet understand.  Assemblage art depends on Keat’s concept of “negative capability,” giving up control, a flat abandon to messes and clutter because the material carries us to ideas.  I tell myself, “stop wasting time, being lazy or distracted.”  And then, the pot begins to boil, and one’s hands are serving the universal creative principle.  

 

I preserve seams and sutures, the junctures, glue, hardware, thrift store and garage sale price tags, the surfaces, all of which honors process, decisions, and “making.”  You to get to participate.  We see the inherent, unavoidable, and amazing cognitive dissonance basic to humanity:  all parts, the sought after, the abandoned, the leftovers, the trash, are utterly necessary to the creation of a whole.  The art lies in the juxtaposition which grows wings and transcends the sum of its parts. 

 

The Why

Why does this matter?  Art isn’t served by being a great mystery that a “fit but few” people can interact with intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.  Postmodernity refutes the “natural” -  all we touch, see, feel, and hear is constructed, what we “know” is a cognitive construction of our minds or others.  This too is art.  Assemblage art’s “built nature,” its use of cultural leftovers, its seams and unnatural junctures, all remind us that everything can be deconstructed, rethought, reimagined, remade.  And that, my friends, is just what might make democracy’s survival possible.