Art: Flight from Approval

The official title of the show opening this week at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art is “The Art of Assemblage.” But the show’s creator, William C. Seitz, explains that the fuller title would be “The Art, Non-Art and Anti-Art of Assemblage.” For an assemblage is neither a painting nor a sculpture, but something beyond, a combining of all sorts of objects —knives and forks, torn bits of burlap, weathered wood, old boxes, smashed pieces of cars, dismembered dolls, an abandoned breakfast—to achieve all sorts of effects. The Modern Museum’s exhibition is the first major show of assemblages ever held, and even at its most non and its most anti, it casts a certain spell.

In its role as reporter, if not as upholder of taste, the museum could hardly have ignored the movement. For the last few years, the assemblers have been taking a bigger and bigger share of the limelight from the abstractionists. Their purpose is to free art from its own limitations by rejecting any dependence on traditional materials—the painter’s oils, the sculptor’s bronze. Assemblers believe that art can be found in any facet or aspect of everyday life. They scour attics, dumps, and shops to find objects that catch their fancy. They arrange these objects without any regard for what they were in their ordinary existence. The theory is that, placed in new and startling contexts, the objects will take on a new life, assume new meanings, reveal some unsuspected truth.

The assemblers at times seem out just for kicks, occasionally seem to be making a point of being noisome, often deliberately choose materials so fragile that their assemblages are doomed to perish. But for all their adventuresomeness and intransigence, they have in their way brought back the image that the abstractionists suppressed. In that sense, they are an avant-garde attacking from the rear.

Kookie Pedigree. As the museum and Seitz’s excellent commentary show, the assemblers have a distinguished, somewhat wood, spires, brush and rod plus a graceful fivesome of wheels by Ettore Colla. kookie, pedigree. One ancestor is Picasso, who in 1912 painted a cubist picture of ordinary objects, threw in the letters J O U (to indicate journal, and hence day-to-day experience), pasted on some oilcloth with a chair-cane pattern, and finally framed the whole thing with a piece of rope. Picasso was creating no ordinary still life: he arranged his painted objects just as the later assemblers were to arrange their actual objects—not as nature would have them, but in accordance with a wholly subjective association. At the same time, he used rope and oilcloth as genuine art materials almost on a par with paint.

In their cubist paintings, Picasso, Braque and Gris were proclaiming that the commonplace, placed smack before the eye. was something to be enjoyed on its own. But the cubists were not the only contributors. The futurists had focused attention on objects that caught the spirit of the age of speed and steel. The Dadaists fractured tradition by denying all standards—at least in theory—of beauty; the surrealists took it as their privilege “to put everything completely out of place,” and the collagists pasted paper, cloth, and other materials into pictures.

That’s Grandmother. The exhibition does well by these “old masters”—so well, in fact, that when the viewer leaves the historical galleries and moves on to those devoted to the present, he has a sense of having been there before. The descendants of Marcel Duchamps’ “readymades”—a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, a urinal, all shown just as they are, but out of context —are everywhere. Arthur Dove used needlepoint, some old shingles, and a page from the Concordance to evoke the essence of Grandmother, just as Edith Schloss uses worn and faded materials for her nostalgic Dow Road and Stephan Durkee for his affecting Sale. The futurists’ obsession with the automobile finds its echo in the car constructions of John Chamberlain. A painted Breakfast by Juan Gris plays parent to an assembled breakfast by Daniel Spoerri.

To a large extent, today’s assemblers seem really to be using yesterday’s revolution to stage a counterrevolution of their own. As Seitz puts it: “They once more demonstrate the necessity for artists to flee the current circle of approval while seeking recognition on,another level, to return again from abstraction to nature, to work with the materials of life rather than art.”