Betye
Saar’s exhibition “Personal Icons” is filled with beautiful, carefully crafted and crisply presented assemblages, in which
the artist recontextualizes found objects and fragments from her own life to
tell a new story. Wandering through Women & Their Work Gallery (W&TW),
it is easy to spot the familiar object — a Mah-Jongg tile, silver milagro, a
brocade fabric — in each small, self-contained work. Who doesn’t have similar
“stuff” stashed in a drawer waiting for just the right use? But Saar converts
the ordinary into art and by building small, altar-like objects, transforms art
into magic. She has infused this exhibition with enough magic to transform the
nastiest anti-art frog into an art-loving prince if only he will pucker up for
a kiss.
Saar collects the materials she uses in her assemblages from friends, flea
markets, and through an exchange with her daughters Alison and Lezley, both
artists. “They were raised to be junkies,” she giggles, meaning that she taught
the girls well about collecting and finding value in all manner of unlikely
objects. Her youngest daughter, Tracye, is a writer and photographer. When she
speaks of her daughters or of her grandchildren, all of whom live, as she does,
in California, the artist is especially animated and forthcoming. She shows
pictures from her wallet like any grandma. Her manner — and her work —
reflect pride in past, present, and future generations.
In 1991, Saar and her daughter Alison exhibited together at a Laguna Gloria
Art Museum exhibition. While Alison’s constructions are ragged-edged and raw
and tend to be larger in scale than her mother’s, both mother and daughter’s
works make use of found objects. It is not hard to imagine where some of their
inspiration came from. In the catalog for the show is a picture of the two
standing in front of Los Angeles’ Watts Towers, built by Simon Rodia. Saar says
she watched Rodia construct his fantastic environment when she was little,
walking through the neighborhood on her way to and from school. Later, she
returned with her daughters. How could an artist not be inspired by the magical
towers with ceramic flotsam and jetsam embedded in their crudely formed walls?
How could she not be taken with the mystery and spirit of the immigrant who
came to this country, built a treasure, then returned to obscurity in his home
in Italy?
Saar is something of a mystery herself. She is 70 years old, a small bundle of
compressed energy with alizarin crimson hair wrapped in a patterned scarf and a
pale, loose-fitting pants suit. When I meet her in the W&TW offices, the
artist has just arrived from the East Coast, and we talk as she eats a quick
lunch amidst the usual pre-opening hubbub. In an hour, she will be driven to a
radio station for an interview, then returned to the gallery for a lecture
prior to the opening of her show. How she manages a schedule that many younger
women would be hard-pressed to keep is a puzzle. Still, on she goes. After
spending little more than 24 non-stop hours in Austin, she will return to
Atlanta to complete an installation of her site-specific work for the Cultural
Olympiad. She is making three “spirit chairs.”
“Can you sit in them?” someone asks.
“Only if you’re a spirit,” she replies.
Much of Saar’s work deals with spiritual matters, with “curiosity about the
mystical,” according to the artist’s statement. She has incorporated into her
recent work ideas from Ajit Mookerjee’s book Tantra Art: Its Philosophy and
Physics, fusing spirituality with scientific method. This seems a natural
direction for Saar, who has often used computer boards and chips in her
constructions. Her investigation of tantric art has led to works that blend
symmetry, simple geometric forms, and a limited palette in constructions which
feature painted surfaces and snippets of photographs she has taken.
In addition to exploring things metaphysical, Saar frequently explores the
multi-racial and multicultural:
My roots are tangled.
My unknown ancestors from
Africa, Ireland, and America
have blurred the boundaries.
I cannot recall the lost legends of
forgotten tribes nor revive
the rituals of fragmented cultures.
A blend of black, white, and red,
I am labeled Creole, mulatto, mixed,
colored in every sense.
Enslaved by the `one-drop-rule’
But liberated by the truth
that all blood is red.
In the past, Saar has used old photographs and objects belonging to deceased
family members to depict her richly textured heritage. She has also
appropriated negative black stereotypes such as Aunt Jemima to represent her
own point of view. “Things haven’t changed that much,” she says, commenting on
the recent burning of black Southern churches. New “political”
assemblages-in-progress, again including Aunt Jemima, wait for her in the
studio.
Above all, the artist is concerned with beauty. “Beauty is a great seducer,”
she says. Saar seduces through the use of beautiful images and by writing
poetic passages which occasionally become part of the art itself. They are
always effectively incorporated into exhibition catalogs that document her
work.
Saar chooses to exhibit primarily in alternative spaces like W&TW and
museums across the country. She markets her own work and shies away from the
“elitist attitude” in the art world which, she says, distorts the process of
making and collecting art. Still, her career sparkles with attention received
from the powers that be: two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants, a
Guggenheim, and a J. Paul Getty Fund for the Visual Arts Fellowship. “When I
got my first NEA in 1974, I looked in the mirror and said `I’m an artist!'” she
reports. “Before that, I just said, `I make things.'”
In August of 1994, Saar had a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio
Center in Italy. “If you were on a desert island, could you still be an
artist?” Saar says she asked herself before the trip. Bellagio was hardly a
desert island, but the artist limited the materials she took with her to a
couple of cameras, small sketchbooks, and some watercolor paints, although she
says she is not a painter. “I use paint to embellish objects.”
Saar was eager to see if she could find new bits and pieces of inspiration in
that place to enhance her work. Evidence of her success may be seen in three
pieces in the “Personal Icons” exhibition: Green Vision at the Villa, Blue
Vision at the Villa, and Red Vision at the Villa. The works aren’t
literal renderings of place, but moody references to its history and elegance.
According to Lizzeta LeFalle-Collins, curator of the exhibition, the
Bellagio-inspired work “exudes the climate and terrain of the Mediterranean
Sea… a sense of discovery of a lost treasure or civilization.”
Unfortunately, the power of Saar’s images and words doesn’t translate into a
scintillating presentation to a crowded gallery in Austin. The artist shows her
slides (twice!), all the while reading from prepared notes. She solicits
questions and takes a few, but her answers are terse; they don’t encourage a
comfortable dialogue about the work or provide insight. Around the periphery of
artists and art aficionados, black students hunker down, stare at the screen,
and listen respectfully. I hope she will engage them directly through her
remarks, but it doesn’t happen. None of her earlier, politically charged
comments on the burning of black churches or the treatment of black women
artists in New York emerge. By the end of the hour, there is palpable relief as
the screen is removed and the chairs are gathered up. Cooled by the motion of
other bodies on their way out the door, many people remain to study the art and
to read the artist’s statement printed on the wall:
Curiosity
about the unknown
has no boundaries.
Symbols, images, places, and cultures merge.
Time slips away.
The stars, the cards, the mystic vigil
may hold the answers.
By shifting the point of view,
an inner spirit is released
free to create.
In the end, the grace and eloquence of the artist’s assemblages and the
written word have to stand alone. Fortunately, this is not difficult. n “Betye Saar/Personal Icons” runs at Women & Their Work Gallery
through August 10.
Rebecca S. Cohen is an arts writer and recovering art dealer.
This article appears in July 26 • 1996 and July 26 • 1996 (Cover).