ART REVIEW : 4 Hip Decades of Assemblage Art

American slang has got to be the breeziest, most irreverent slanguage on the planet. The art technique known as Assemblage is its visual equivalent, raunchy, cracked and sweet. An important optical encyclopedia of the genre’s local history is on view at UCLA’s Wight Gallery in the exhibition “Forty Years of California Assemblage.” It suits the state’s casual, iconoclastic, eccentric freewheeling side.

The show boogies through the decades, cracking its gum, talking dirty and wearing scruffy threads with cheap red wine stains. Some 100 works concocted of everything from faded skin-mag girlies to a tin-tub coffin slouch around the galleries mumbling obscenities, sighing for lost love and berating life’s injustice. Their 58 makers are as prominent as Ed Kienholz, as obscure as Jeremy Anderson, as lyrical as George Herms, as bittersweet as Bruce Houston.

It is the UCLA Art Council exhibition, characteristically the gallery’s most ambitious project of the year. The show--on view through May 21--was put together by guest curator Anne Ayres and comes with a catalogue containing contributions by people as smart in the sphere as veteran museum director Henry Hopkins. A full-dress affair.

Browsing, the seasoned viewer finds a quaint and nostalgic sense of the past revisited. Ah, beatniks and hippies. Where are they now? Evolved into carpentry specialists for movie sets or collapsed by drugs in doorways like sacks of bearded ordure.

There is a great bracing sense of rebellion about this heartfelt art which stands in vivid, depressing contrast to today’s timid, bland designer language with its corporate undertone and fear of giving offense. Ceaseless sexual braggadocio has given way to talk of mutual funds. Honest dirty words are masked in euphemism. It’s a throwback to days when only those who spoke foreign tongues were allowed to understand the naughty parts of novels. Well, merde .

Not so for the California Assemblagist. He cussed like a good ol’ boy even while secretly understanding such Parisian notions as collage. He may have sneaked some Surrealism, Freud and Jung but he worked like a slum witch doctor fashioning fetishes out of magic trash. Look there at Bruce Conner comparing a bird’s nest to a woman’s sex and panty hose to spider webs. Wonderful poetry edged with death.

This art says We Are Poor but We Are Not Dumb. Alexis Smith’s tin-can pictures are all about literature. Wallace Berman’s pet rocks come with chains and cabalistic signs that remember Jewish history, ancient and modern.

There are ideas in this exhibition. A section on L.A. precursors includes such archaic heroes as Knud Merrild and Peter Krasnow but also reminds us that Man Ray lived here in the ‘40s and may have brought Assemblage seeds from Paris. That is an interesting and apparently original conceit, all the more significant as we have a big Man Ray survey currently at the Museum of Contemporary art. There is an excellent chance here for those still educating themselves to put the two shows together. Further enrichment will likely come from an exhibition on California Pop art opening soon at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. The connection between Assemblage and Pop is too obvious to mention. Pop was the Mannerist phase of Populist Assemblage--a true Everyman art.

The spread is full of nice patches such as a reminder that Richard Pettibone was an early precursor of Appropriationism--today’s habit of copying other people’s art as a weary philosophical gesture. But as one wanders the UCLA compendium unworthy thoughts gnaw termite-style through the cerebral cortex, fussy professorial nit-picks.

Is this Conner really an Assemblage or is it a collage? Is this Jeremy Anderson not more of a wood sculpture and that Robert Howard more a rustic mobile? The influence of Alberto Giacometti’s Surrealist phase is pervasive early on and he wasn’t an Assemblage artist.

The show attempts to carry us through an evolution of assemblage. There was a kind of Baroque phase in the early ‘60s but there is no major Kienholz to prove the point. There was a Pop phase in the days when Tony Berlant made gently wry works like “Virginia Twice.” But by then Assemblagist cheekiness had been refined into Craig Kauffman’s plastics and Billy Bengston’s lacquered hearts. It would look funny to have these Finish Fetish artists in an Assemblage show, but there is something missing without them.

Ah, that’s it. This exhibition is one of those well-meant stabs at definition that flounders because it is at once too broad and too narrow. It is too tenacious in clinging to the idea of Assemblage after the term came to include too many different kinds of art to remain meaningful. Assemblage has gotten to be like, have a nice day and groovy --essentially without content.

It doesn’t mean much if it can absorb everything from Herms’ soulful bric-a-brac to David Wilson’s science-fiction video camera, which seems to put flesh back on a skeleton and flowers on a dead twig. It’s interesting but why is it Assemblage? If Tom Foolery’s minimovie tableaux are Assemblage why aren’t Roland Reiss’?

If a term means everything it means nothing.

In the early ‘60s New York’s Museum of Modern Art presented an Assemblage show that still stands as the elite, selective definition of the genre. A few years back the old L.A. Institute of Contemporary Art did a funny assemblage survey that in effect destroyed the term.

The crowded institute show proved that virtually everybody makes Assemblage. Belgians and Greeks do it. Nice young men who sell antiques do it. The show included everybody from artists to collectors, dealers and housewives, neurotics and actors. It was a merry act of deconstruction and nobody who saw it could ever feel quite the same.

What “Forty Years” really shows us is the relics of an era that is regrettably past. We had soul in those days and we lost it.