ART REVIEW : Four Decades of Getting It Together in California

More than art composed of disparate elements, assemblage is an attitude. It divests art of its preciousness while proclaiming the worth of lowly castoffs. Assemblagists are romantic eccentrics, hermits or the Beat generation’s fabulous characters who infuse scavenged materials with poetry or moral truth.

Born in San Francisco bars and Los Angeles’ canyons, California assemblage may have been slicked up a bit over the years, but it remains a fringe activity.

Or so we might have thought before “Lost and Found in California: Four Decades of Assemblage Art” took the summer gallery season by storm. The exhibition (to Sept. 7) fills three Santa Monica galleries--James Corcoran, Shoshana Wayne and Pence--with sculptural objects. Related photographs are at the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery in West Hollywood.

Sandra Leonard Starr, of Corcoran, curated the show and wrote a catalogue that includes a “collective memoir” of artists, their colleagues and families from 1940 to 1969. Her introductory essay, a joyful “pocket history,” conveys her affection for the work along with fascinating information. A former New Yorker, Starr came to this project as a scholar of master assemblagist Joseph Cornell. Having embraced the West Coast in “Lost andFound,” she seems certain to change perceptions of the genre.

Here’s no less celebrated a painter than Richard Diebenkorn making “Fetishes” of found objects (in 1953-54) and explaining that real things can “establish a surface” or give a painting “a presence” it might otherwise lack. There’s painter Joan Brown making a nasty “Fur Rat” of wood, chicken wire, plaster and raccoon fur. It’s no surprise to find works by such assemblage giants as Wallace Berman, Ed Kienholz and George Herms. But Ed Ruscha? Joe Goode? Bruce Nauman? Laddie John Dill? Charles Arnoldi? “Lost and Found” clearly takes a broad view of assemblage.

Starr occasionally stretches the point--as in Arnoldi’s “Bogey,” which qualifies because it is made of painted twigs but seems too concerned with formal abstraction to fit in any parade of improbable constructions. However, most of the other surprises revive forgotten chapters of well-known artists’ work or put an intriguing new slant on it.

Dill, for example, probably has never produced more successful work than his plate glass, sand and argon environments like the 1970 model at Pence. Goode’s solid-color paintings with painted milk bottles in front of them tend to fit into Pop art history, but here they make sense as assemblage.

The exhibition begins chronologically at Corcoran with “The First Generation 1940-1962.” An international sampling of precursors--small works by Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Arthur Dove and others--set the stage for the California event, which opens with Wallace Berman, a brilliant iconoclast who was the guru of Southern California assemblage; Clay Spohn, who played a comparable role in the Bay Area, and Surrealist Man Ray, who moved to Los Angeles in 1940 and exerted considerable influence here.

Man Ray gets his licks in quickly with a “Silent Harp” (made of a cello neck, wood trivet, metal disc and wood square) and “La Fortuna III” (combining a wheel of fortune with a roll of toilet paper on a spring mount). In “Precious Objects,” Spohn has stuffed junk into a gum dispenser. This witty strain of Surrealist and Dada-inspired irreverence continues through the show, but works concerned with religion, mysticism and morality provide a somber counterpoint. Consider Berman’s wooden cross, a booth-like “Temple” and a rock chained to a block of wood painted with Hebrew letters.

Then there’s Berman’s run-in with the Los Angeles Police Department’s vice squad. A photo reproduces the small drawing of two lovers (by a poet, artist and psychic who calls herself Cameron) that Berman included in an assemblage. Police visited the 1957 show at Ferus Gallery and charged him with displaying “lewd and lascivious” material. Berman closed the exhibition rather than submit to censorship.

While Berman stands up to censors, Herms makes a monument to him, turning an antique desk on its side, filling its cubbyholes with memorabilia and calling it “The Berman Peace.” In “The Meat Market,” another vintage work by Herms, a couple of mannequins fool around in the corner of a shop where an abused doll lies on a shelf.

Meanwhile, Kienholz confronts death and other grim issues in a half-dozen works from the ‘60s. “(It Takes Two to Integrate) Cha, Cha, Cha,” for example, pairs identical black and white dolls in separate compartments of a box. Stamped with squares of their partner’s skin color, the dolls seem to stare through screens of racial prejudice.

Ben Talbot’s “The Ace” hails the glories of World War I flying aces on the front of a big sculpture composed of targets, an electric-fan “propeller,” a street sign and various pictures of planes and pilots. On the back of this ungainly assemblage, the wonder of flight turns into a military nightmare as a nuclear attack produces a tool box full of bloody baby dolls.

Starr has divided the “second generation” of assemblage into “The Narrative 1959-1987” at Shoshana Wayne and “Form and Idea 1960-1987” at Pence. Wayne offers such narrative treasures at Vija Celmins’ fur-lined “House,” painted in grisaille as if a train were steaming through it and a gun is being shot from its roof.

Clayton Bailey’s hilarious sendup of scientific research, taken from his “Wonders of the World Museum,” flaunts a sideshow mentality in such exhibits as “Dr. Gladstone’s Approved Method of Finding Bigfoot Droppings.” Kim Abeles takes us on a ludicrous tour of historical preservation as she presents a scorched ironing board cover as the Bayeux Tapestry. Michael C. McMillen turns us into voyeurs as we spy a messy pool hall through the peep hole of a graffiti-covered door.

There’s wonderful stuff to dawdle over--including Jonathan Borofsky’s real Ping-Pong table that reduces warring superpowers and defense budgets to a harmless game--but we move on to Pence for “Form and Idea.” Narrative works such as John Baldessari’s photos-and-text piece, “A Different Kind of Order (The Thelonius Monk Story),” confuse the division between the two galleries, but the emphasis at Pence generally shifts away from storytelling to formal or conceptual cohesion.

Deborah Butterfield creates the essence of a horse from muddy-looking paper pulp and fiberglass on an armature of sticks and wire. Connie Zehr presents a metaphysical landscape made of circles of sand, clay forms and a steel rod. Eric Orr’s “Saturday Night Special” gives you an opportunity to sit in a chair with a gun at your head; all you have to do to end it all is press a foot pedal. Dennis Oppenheim’s lead-headed doll, in a piece called “Attempt to Raise Hell,” has no choice. Every 10 minutes he gets hit in the head by a great big bell, scaring the wits out of some gallery visitors.

Something for--and by--everyone? Well, yes, but the three sculptural portions of the exhibition work because a single curatorial vision unites them and keeps the show surprisingly uncluttered.

The same can’t be said for the photography section, however. For one thing, this segment has a different curator, gallery owner G. Ray Hawkins. For another, the very nature of photography removes viewers from the real texture and presence of its subjects. Some of the artists, notably Darryl Curran, grapple with this as they include photographs with found objects. But most collect or overlay images in works that feel more like two-dimensional collage than three-dimensional assemblage.

Berman’s verifax prints of a portable radio and various symbols, plus a photograph of a sign announcing the closure of his Ferus show, cycle back to the first part of the exhibition at Corcoran, however. And the photo segment does adhere to the notion that assemblage is not a wayward tributary that wanders off into the woods and disappears into a pond behind some latter-day hippie’s cabin. While denying assemblage none of its romantic history, “Lost and Found” presents assemblage as a vibrant current in the mainstream.