ART REVIEW : ASSEMBLAGE EXHIBITION IS A STUDY IN EXCESS

Assemblage is known as an art of accumulation, of piled-up castoffs or collected trivia, but it’s really an art of selection. Most assemblagists only behave as pack rats because they are involved in a perpetual search for the perfect discard, the single object that will spark an idea or link a bunch of disparate parts together.

This bit of insight doesn’t come easily amid the visual overload in “Southern California Assemblage: Past and Present,” an unwieldy survey split between UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies and the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (through Oct. 25).

Not only is nearly every piece packed with recycled tidbits; the exhibition itself is a study in concentrated excess. Though it has been divided into a “Past” section (covering the ‘50s and ‘60s) at the university and the “Present” (‘70s and ‘80s) at the Forum, both segments are so jammed that purists will be forgiven for mourning the demise of Minimalism.

Consider Bob Anderson, one of the great gray men of Southern California assemblage. He has solidified a veritable garage-full of junk into towering, suitably dusty sculpture. Arthur Secunda seems to have emptied a drawer of hardware, broken gadgets and trinkets into each of his acrylic resin panels. George Herms has wired a whole batch of clodhoppers into a “Shoe Tree.” And here’s Gordon Wagner, making door-size assemblages from a mangled typewriter, a vacancy sign and wood that has endured several incarnations.

Yet even such artful junkies as these are discriminating. Their selection process is likely to begin with a category such as rusty hardware, used clothing, plastic toys or carpenters’ scraps, chosen both for form and associative power. Aage Pedersen, for example, must have raided a thrift shop’s lingerie counter to make lacy sculptures based on themes of maternity and other female conditions. She has assembled bras, garter belts, petticoats and dolls in tall, symmetrical forms that rise from slender bases as frilly balloons or parasols.

Threading your way through the overwhelming array of assemblage, you find that Ronald G. Robertson combines mementos of aggression in a quietly powerful piece called “Dulce Bellum Inexpertis,” Richard Allen Morris subsumes artists’ supplies and tools in abstract wall pieces, Sabato Fiorello displays images of himself in plexiglass boxes and so on.

Though the artists transform their material, if only by force of context, they also become identified with their foundlings, just as more conventional artists are known for their oils, watercolors or lithographs. But assemblage components are ready mades that arrive in the studio with their own history. The artists who use them have the advantage of beginning with premade forms and the disadvantage of having to figure out a convincing use for them.

None of this is news to people who have been watching assemblage for the past several decades, but nothing much is news in the exhibition either. Organized as a labor of love (with a measure of self-interest) by assemblagist Elena Siff, the exhibition intends nothing more than to present a “community of kindred spirits” in a celebration of Southern California’s tradition of assemblage.

This is the sort of show that you want to work because it represents an artist’s passion and tireless effort. And I suppose it does work for those who want nothing more than a lot of interesting stuff to look at. That is here in quantity: Dave Quick’s mechanized chicken that lays a nuclear egg, John Outterbridge’s apt interpretation of “Ethnic Heritage” as a black spirit locked inside a suit of armor, Alison Saar’s spooky wooden dog with an electric light in his trap-door stomach; Edward V. Quoss’ amusing tree trunk that turns into a flaming mass of pencils; Nancy Youdelman’s wistful look at the past in a little lace dress strewn with buttons and impressed with old photographs.

Such assemblage luminaries as Edward Kienholz are represented, along with Richard and Shirley Pettibone who have long since left the genre for painting. But apart from the chronological division and its vague evocation of history, there is little organization in evidence here.

That’s a pity. No sooner do you point out the abundance of assemblage in this region than you want to know what, if anything, makes the work regional. Once you note the tenacity of a genre that got its start when Picasso made a bull’s head from a bicycle seat and handlebars, you wonder how far assemblage has wandered from the early days of Modernism. Are Southern California assemblagists the ultimate appropriators? Did they inspire the Post-Modernist notion that because there are already too many images (or objects) in the world, artists should recycle existing ones?

There has been no survey of Southern California assemblage for many years now, but we’re due for more than an update. It’s time for a curator to differentiate the genre’s social critics, poets and punsters; to look at the romantic sensibility that thrives among assemblagists; to examine assemblage’s confluence of form and content, and to trace chronological developments, if indeed there are any.

In short, it’s time to exercise the same selectivity the artists practice.