Assemblage

I made the sculpture above last year, it formed the center of a newspaper about the Sheffield artist George Fullard and his assemblages.  My Friend Stephen Walker wrote this small piece for me-

It is interesting to consider George Fullard’s Assemblages from the 1960s alongside other assemblages (and the broader context of their emergence in the same period), in order to emphasise the particular intention and impact of Fuller’s pieces.

Many people during this time celebrated the potential they observed in bringing together —assembling—material and ideas from a wide variety of things and disciplines. Gilbert Simondon referred to this as supporting ‘transcategorical knowledge’. It was believed to operate across widely differing categories, low and high, science and art, human and nature.  Fullard’s near-namesake Richard Buckminster Fuller’s work through the post-war period became emblematic of this work for many North American and European countercultural groups. The environmental impulse in 1960s art, associated with the Independent Group in the UK or avant-garde artists in the USA, emphasised superficial similarity between categorically different things, or advocated immersive environments and Happenings (Kaprow etc) where the assemblage of artist, spectator/audience and location attempted to smooth over categorical complexity that related these ingredients in traditional art.

But Fullard’s Assemblages operate by maintaining a clarity of origin and reference to the strange ingredients he brought together in each piece. More akin to William S Burroughs’ ‘cut up’ technique, Fullard’s Assemblages play with both visual and material languages: defying the smooth ‘transcategorical’ products of contemporary Assemblages, his works retain sufficient legibility of their component parts for these to transport the audience away to multiple other contexts, while the strangeness of their assembled composition pushes and pulls these component parts, and their resonance (dissonance). Moreover, maintaining contact with the art-gallery system, Fullard’s Assemblages also operate by posing a challenge to the contemplative distance expected of viewers in front of conventional artworks in the conventional surroundings of the art gallery. This mixture is further complicated (or smoothed) by (proposed) castings in bronze of some of Fullard’s Assemblages and the resulting homogenization of their operative material dissonance. 

I have come back to it here as it's probably the last work I did that people would recognise as an artwork - not just the assemblage homage but the whole thing. I made paper hats from the newspaper and placed them on the head of one of Fullards' bronzes that are is sited in front of the winter gardens in Sheffield.

I'm in the thick of reading and it feels like an assemblage of ideas and thoughts forming.  After meeting with Laura I felt like I had a way to move forward so in the background I'm quietly reading Dewey and then I'm going to read some Maxine Greene and I'm hoping to fill in a few holes.  The thing I'm learning is to be consistent but not systematic and that is why I'm returning to arts practice, this is how I always approach the making of art, it is a process of falling through an idea and living on the inside of it.  This is very different to having an idea and trying to realise it or manifest it in the world. I'm really pleased to have found this correlation it makes the thinking fit better and the long walks and jiggling of ideas feel both  familiar and  unfamiliar.

Two things have struck me as I've been reading some of the more recent literature on artists in education.  The first is that much of the writing that attempts to decentre or flatten the individual, the subjective, the position in space and time, whether through the post-human or individuation or the rhizomatic  or the corporal and affect or event  can take some of the raging egocentric idiosyncratic navel gazing out of what constitutes art.  To an extent it frees art from the double bind of the self and individual desire, makes it more open to possibilities of the collective and collective actions. Secondly in the massive struggle to avoid dualism, bifurcation, deconstructionism, the breaking down into parts there is often a very difficult and examined bifurcation of Art and none Art - and Artist and non Artist. In some of the writing , actually most of the most recent writing within the context of education there is an almost spiritual potential to how art and artists are imagined within some of the writing.  Although it is reminiscent of Joseph Beuys  ideas of artist as both Shaman and Sharletton it is as with Beuys completely sincere, it has to be sincere for it to work.

So my reading and thinking is drawing on the idea of assemblage or as Manning corrects Massumi - assengement and I quite like the disparate nature of what is coming together and the need not to actually be making sense of it.  That is what art has to feel like, for me it has to be a falling through.  In my first post here I talked of needing a safety harness, perhaps that is the last thing I actually need.