Dali House

It’s fascinating how life progresses – always appearing to be aimless and then gradually congealing from every which direction and somehow making perfectly concrete sense. When I was but a teenager wearing the first blush of Art Appreciation, I had (a) a yen to be creative and (b) a whole crate of childhood artefacts that held no value at all for anyone else but me. The then-newly-chic concept of assemblages popped up, in Time magazine, I think, so I turned my crate on its side, rearranged the toys and stuff, daubed on a little paint and pasted in paper cut-outs, and had myself a 3D collage, a spectral display of Christmases Past. Cool or what?

Now here I am years later, having accumulated yet another vast batch of things that are for the most part meaningless to everyone else, and a new “crate” to keep them in – a weblog. Dali House and its dad, Dorseyland, have been from the outset a place for my stuff.
So it’s only fitting that I pay tribute to the great assemblypersons of history and their current counterparts, beginning with Bruce Lacey’s busily rollicking “The Womaniser”, above, from 1966.

Artists had been putting walls of various sizes around their paintings for years, but the modern notion of 3D assemblages initially evolved from the cubist collages of P-P-Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque about 1911, then the sculptural assemblages of the futurists like Umberto Boccioni and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Shown here is something Picasso tossed together in his Boulevard Raspail studio in 1913: a figure composition in progress with newspaper, guitar, table and still-life objects. Buncha junk, really, so no wonder it vanished soon after the photo was taken, probably pawned off piece by piece. Mine just went in the garbage.
Picasso’s “Still Life with Chair Caning” from 1911 featured a piece of oilcloth and some imitation chair caning pasted onto the canvas, all framed with rope.

The great dadaist Marcel Duchamp thought this was a splendid idea and invented the “ready-mades” from a bucket of “found objects” he’d, um, found. Where he got the urinal, he didn’t say, but once it had his signature on it and was submitted to a gallery exhibition, it was art.

Next up to bat, almost literally, was another dadaist, who once famously said, “My name is Kurt Schwitters. I am an artist and I nail my pictures together.” The German (1887-1948) was a fierce dabbler in “Merzbilder”, a word he invented because he’s used a fragment of the word kommerz in an early assemblage. This devolved into just plain Merz, which Schwitters explained thus in 1919:

“The word Merz denotes essentially the combination, for artistic purposes, of all conceivable materials, and, technically, the principle of the equal distribution of the individual materials … A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint.”

Boring talk for something as magnificent as “Merzbau: The Desiring House”, and talk about a “work in progress”! He toiled away at this fantasy suite in his Hannover studio from 1919 until one night “in October 1937″ (one website sez) when the Allies dropped a bomb on it. I find it impossible to believe the Allies were bombing Germany in 1937, but then it is quite true that “everyone’s a critic”.

Schwitters considered it his life’s work, though, and by God he was going to do his level best to finish it. He carted up the bits and started all over again in Norway in 1937, but it burned down. Then he shipped out to England in 1947 and set to hammering once more, but would you believe it, he died the next year before it got done.

In its best incarnation, the Merzbau grew and grew all over the Hannover studio, stretching vertically and horizontally to adjacent rooms and ultimately taking over the whole place like the man-eating plant in “Little Shop of Horrors”. Found objects and sculptural forms – “spoils and relics”, as Schwitters called them (shades of my chosen term “artefacts”) – were spiked into place at any old angle and chunks of what was already put up were sawn off. There were countless nooks and grottoes some completely obstructed by later additions, so that the contents existed only in memory. Schwitters finally cut through the ceiling and floor to let the beast flourish further outside the building, which is perhaps how it was spotted by an understandably alarmed Allied bombardier.

Despite all the noise Schwitters made hammering away in three different countries, people really only started calling assemblages assemblages in the early 1950s when Jean Dubuffet showed off his collages that utilised butterfly wings, dubbed assemblages d’empreintes. Shown here is his “Personage of Butterfly Wings”, made with actual wings and sloshes of goauche.

Then in 1961, the New York Museum of Modern Art hosted a show called “The Art of Assemblage”, and the course for the rest of the jouney was pretty much set.
By that time, American sculptor Joseph Cornell (1903-72) had already done a lot of the advance scouting. Schwitters used discarded urban junk, but Cornell preferred broken bits of more delicate items and went for nostalgia in his little glass-fronted wooden cabinets. A buddy of the surrealists, he too loved to juxtapose things irrationally. In this piece, “Abeilles” from 1940, he’s got an evidently cut-up phrase, “les abeilles ont attempt le bleu celeste pale“, which according to my often unhelpful Babelfish translator means “the bees have attempt blue celeste blade”. No, I don’t get it either. It looks to me like like Louis XV and some other French dandies have succeeded in chasing some bees (if that’s indeed what they are) into a blue hole in the picture and, erm, that’s it.

Another American picked up the baton from there. The great pop artist Robert Rauschenburg, who I think is still with us, though he’s gotta be 90-odd by now, called his assemblages “combines”, which sounds about right for a guy from Texas. Seen here is “Canyon”. He too used junk, things like car tires and licence plates and stuffed animals, and slathered on some paint because, otherwise, it’s just going to look like a bunch of junk.

There’s quite a list of contemporary assemblage artists at this website, and devotees of the genre have their own Yahoo Group too. As a random sampling from the Net, below, clockwise from top left, are “Divergence to Unity” by Frieda Howling of Stratford, connecticut, “Hand on a Hand” by Christopher Carman, “Window, Planets” by Torontonian and a fellow Sheridan alumnus of mine, Barbara Bickell, and “Where are You on the Food Chain” by Jacque Parsley from Kentucky.