ART REVIEW : Brea Gallery Assembles a Surprisingly Serious Exhibition

The Brea Civic & Cultural Center Gallery is the kind of institution that likes art with its edges smoothed and its outlook positive. The gallery’s commitment to giving the general public what it wants pretty much guarantees a cold shoulder from more knowledgeable and sophisticated viewers.

Seen in that light, “Assemblage Art: A Poetic Transformation” (through Dec. 2) comes as a complete surprise. To be sure, the exhibit is heavy on lightweight pieces, and the catalogue is regrettably amateurish. But a significant portion of the work by 16 artists is serious stuff. And the very idea of this gallery offering such a show is startling: The anarchic, idealistic, street-smart personality of assemblage art flaunts most of the values a prosperous suburban community of the 1980s probably holds dear.

Assemblage is the art of juxtaposing real, everyday objects that have had useful lives of their own. In the best works, what results is much like what happens when words come together in a poem: new meanings form and new images arise, some immediately obvious and some sinking in over time.

The best assemblage works are not simply decorative objects; they are born from an urgency to vent a point of view about the big meaty issues in life, like war and sex and religion. And--in the beginning, largely because the artists were broke--there is a perverse love of objects that are cast off, ugly, cheap or broken.

The glory days of assemblage art in California were the 1950s and ‘60s, a period that coincided with the flowering of Beat poetry, a lively interest in jazz and the so-called Funk art movement, which reveled in the weirdness of using non-art materials as peculiar as nylon stockings and hair combings.

Works that came out of that period were the centerpieces of exhibits last summer at four Los Angeles galleries (James Corcoran, Pence, Shoshana Wayne and G. Ray Hawkins) collectively titled “Lost and Found in California: Four Decades of Assemblage Art in California.”

Happily, a few pieces from “Lost and Found”--by George Herms, Fred Mason, Ben Talbert, Michael McMillen, David Best and Gilbert Lujan--have found their way into the show in Brea.

Herms, whose work is perhaps the most personal and quirkily lyrical of them all, has a small area of the gallery to himself. His “Berman Peace” from 1986--a dresser lying on its side with its drawers open or removed, and various objects piled on top--is a tribute to Wallace Berman. An artist fascinated by the curious open-endedness of mystical symbolism, a pioneer of assemblage in Southern California and a good friend of Herms, Berman was killed by a drunk driver 12 years ago.

It isn’t easy to “translate” all the odds and ends in “Berman Peace.” There is a light bulb topped with pile of hair clippings, an old piece of foam doubled over and stapled, a scrap of paper with a mildly profane penciled message that Berman evidently wrote to Herms. The jokey parts are the easiest to get: a plastic-encased “tongue cleaner” with the words “poems wanted” stuck on the package, a goosenecked lamp near a photo of goose-stepping soldiers.

But it’s the ethos of the piece that counts the most--the humble, throwaway appeal to the spirit of an extraordinary person and to an era that now seems sadly remote.

Fred Mason’s “Superball” of 1969 is a small wooden piece dangling a collection of dolls’ arms and legs. A faded rose, feathers and hanks of hair are other rather ghoulish testimonies to lust rewarded.

Talbert is represented by “The Ace,” from 1961-62. Loaded with pictures of handsome pilots and charts displaying planes of the Allied and Axis powers, a Betty Grable pinup and an old cartridge belt, it looks like a wistful trip down some World War II memory lane. But the back of the piece displays an angry line of swastikas and a box filled with bloody dolls.

McMillen’s “Mike’s Pool Hall” re-creates the illusion of a scuzzy hangout with old newspapers and beer cans on the floor--but you can only see it by peering through a tiny security lens mounted around the corner from a graffiti-sprayed door.

Best is a younger artist whose work mingles genteel, 19th-Century accouterments in a deliberately airless, even faintly morbid way. In “Behind Every Man,” he tricks out a cane chair with a stuffed bird perched on a Chinese teapot, a crucified Christ, a fragment of an old portrait of a lady and an oozily draped golden cloak.

Robert Heinecken’s photographic work isn’t usually considered assemblage. But the salty three-dimensional collages he makes of crumpled-up glossy magazine advertisements seem at home in an environment dedicated to offbeat social commentary.

Work by lesser-known artists in the show tends to have a spiffier, more polished look. John Temple, for example, makes snappy, simple silhouettes of objects suspended within frames by arrangements of springs, wires and chains.

Some recent approaches replace the messy-but-meaningful old stuff with heavy-footed obviousness (like Gene Karraker’s “Nail Shirt and Crown” and Elizabeth Kenneday’s “The Enchantment”), attractive blandness (work by Leslie Caldera and Lynn Nelson) or cutesy clutter (Janice Lowry-Gothold’s boxed creations). Unfortunately, pieces by these five artists account for nearly half the work in the show.

The other bad news is the catalogue, a budget job with wretched black-and-white reproductions, inept design, a miserly 1-paragraph note attempting to define assemblage and a hodgepodge of artists’ quotes and biographical data. It would have been better to either locate private support for a more professional brochure or to issue plain-vanilla typewritten information sheets with the salient information (and use the money saved to hire a knowledgeable writer).

Still, as a bid for attention from the folks who turn up their noses at the work of watercolor societies and painters of the Wild West, “Assemblage Art” makes a strong beginning.

“Assemblage Art: A Poetic Transformation” continues through Dec. 2 at the Brea Civic & Cultural Center Gallery, 1 Civic Center Circle, Brea. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, noon to 8 p.m. Thursday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 990-7730.