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David R. Guenette ARCH ART |
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ASSEMBLAGE, FOUND OBJECTS, UTILITY, AND INTENTIONAL PRESENTATION
[Click here to see images of this show]
Digitas Gallery (Boston, MA; March-May 2003)
My art is made out of the material created in the headlong rush of materialism: recoveries from forgotten trunks, drawers, and boxes, gleanings of estates, flea markets, and tag sales, and the revealed and retrieved from streets, sidewalks, and trash piles. The material includes media—photographs, slides, cards, prints—that are plentiful, to say the least. But there’s more: the written and printed record of personal and public lives is also copious, from the informational sort, such as diaries, letters, books, documents, and magazines, to the many and various recording products, such as films, records, and tapes. Not surprisingly, these objects are capable of being powerfully infused with nostalgia. Even physical objects with which viewers are not personally involved (such as an anonymous fourth-grade class photograph, or an unfamiliar piece of costume jewelry) are likely to have meaning projected on to them by the viewers. This projection is a fundamental element of any and all art forms, of course. What may have changed over the last century is that everyday things have become aesthetically objectified, through the work of artists such as Joseph Cornell, whose work is seminal when it comes to found objects and assemblage. Not only is Cornell’s work achingly beautiful, but, together with surrealists such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Cornell was central to ushering in a new concept of media where “everyday” things become as much a matter in building art as clay, pigment, pen, paper. I think of my own assemblages as “image poems,” where, just as happens in poetry, images are presented in a way that will allow them to be experienced swiftly by the viewers. “There is always a phantasmagoria,” said Yeats; and the word suggests the rapidity of a shared dream experience, even as it suggests the inability to directly describe such perceptions. By bringing a utilitarian function to my work—however formal or improbable—I hope to further elicit the participation of the viewer. Many of my pieces use lighting elements for just such purpose. Another strategy is to make the objects’ arrangement more artificial through the finish and workmanship of an applied furniture-making process. Indeed, many of these pieces are in their own ways furniture. In fact, the impulse toward recycling and re-use is an important one in my work, even if the nod to worldly stewardship is absurd in its form. Craft too plays a central role in the work, as I strive to mix the flotsam of our lives—kipple in the words of Philip K. Dick—with artisan techniques that are a reaction to the commoditization of our age. The elements of absurdity in my work are, I hope, apt, not only given the associations among assemblage, surrealists, and dada-ists, but because it provides another irony: commercialism, the keystone in our world of material excretion, is mocked. Like the Popeil Veg-a-matic sales cry, “But Wait! There’s More!,” I can state that many of these art works are not only sculpture, “But also a lamp! Now how much would you expect to pay?” Absurdity notwithstanding, there is the aesthetic experience of the objects and the combinations and presentations themselves that isn’t ironic, but rather a simple reflection of an openness to and a hungering after beauty, even in such otherwise ridiculous, or nostalgic, or everyday objects. In the end, I hope, my work reflects puzzles of a larger sort, as an effort of wrestling with the most basic struggles in which we are all engaged: consumption versus conservation, paying attention versus being overwhelmed, mass commodity versus individuality, nostalgia versus presence, despair versus grace.
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Image poems for the concrete world. Copyright © David R. Guenette guenette@comcast.net |
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