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Curatorial Press
"Assembly Lines" by
Robert L. Pincus
San Diego Union Tribune, February 5, 2004
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Assemblage,
the art of making sculpture from
varied materials, is nearly a century old now. 1912 was its
landmark year when Picasso fashioned a guitar from sheet metal and
wire. Duchamp wasn't far behind, taking the notion in a different
in-your-face direction. He acquired a bicycle wheel, turned it upside
down and attached it to a stool in 1913, calling the simple
construction an "altered ready-made." Picasso's
breakthrough was formal. It was sculpture in a new medium. Duchamp's
gesture was philosophical. He surely knew people would say "But is it
art?'' |
All three artists in
"Generation to Generation: Contemporary
Assemblage" could trace their lineage back to Picasso and his humble
guitar. The emphasis in this show is on the visual and the visceral,
transformed materials rather than found ones. Printed tin is James
Watt's signature medium, decorated with sort of pictorial images one
would find on cookie containers. Broken glass, real butterflies and
scarabs, and old photographic images are favored media for Poupee
Boccaccio. Irma Sofia Poeter, who once trained in fashion design,
turns stuffed clothing into surrogate human figures.
This exhibition, installed with a sensitive eye for the strengths of
each artist, is on view at the Oceanside Museum of Art. Credit
curators Debby and Larry Kline - collaborating artists as well as
husband and wife - with seeing how three seemingly disparate figures
could be brought together to create a cogent show. And credit the
Klines and the museum with giving gifted artists - all local, meaning
from San Diego and Tijuana - a generous presentation of their work.
There is an intensity of craft, of overarching vision and of visual
effects that Watts, Boccaccio and Poeter share. Each has a keen
interest in representing figures imbued with a spiritual as well as a
physical dimension. Watts' figures, with tin skins atop wood frames,
have persistently possessed the quality of caricatures. They have
bulbous noses, bulging bellies and ungainly limbs. He pits their
comic appearance against their serious fate, setting up a finely tuned
dissonance.
There's "Prometheus" (1995), seated on a circular pedestal and with the
companion eagle of Greek mythology. In the age-old tales, Zeus chained
the deity to a rock for giving fire to humans; the eagle reportedly
paid a daily visit to feed on Prometheus’ liver. Watt's Prometheus
revises his gender and the artist's eagle is an amusing little bird
dangling from a chain and pipe. There are literally hundreds of
little images and bits of text that make Prometheus' surface, as with
so many of his figures. The face of Churchill appears out from
his face and the words "It's a Wonderful Life" surface elsewhere on his
head. The movie title has an ironic edge to it, given Prometheus'
troubled fate. But its words seem to be more of a free-floating
message, since the buoyant phrase recurs on other sculptures. Like
Prometheus, Watt's other works are replete with spiritual allusions.
He's done "Kokeshi Dolls" on a grand scale and decorated one with a
found imprint of "A Psalm of David." His religious references
aren't messianic or didactic. Rather, they are part of a beatific
vision of life. Even little images of Alfred E. Neuman captioned with
his indelible slogan "What Me Worry?" take on a different slant in the
context of Watts' art. They become a lighthearted mantra instead
of a wisecrack.
Boccaccio depicts angels, human-scale ones. They have none of
Watts' jaunty comic sensibility, but they do display an equal measure
of visual drama. Done in shattered glass and wood, they flank a
doorway. One pair functions as sentries to a room that contains a
jarring sight - a life-size bed housing a giant heart covered with a
skin of glass. The heart is in two pieces, lying on its side, and
the jagged edge of each half is gilded. There are butterflies in
relief on the headboard. This work, "Suenos Rebeldes (Rebellious
Dreams)," is like a vivid metaphor of a broken heart made
literal. It's also clear that Boccaccio means for us to connect
this stunning sight with other works in the show, many of which contain
pictures of a strikingly pretty little girl. She is, as the
exhibition catalog tells us, Boccaccio's sister. Catherine Boccaccio,
15 years older than Poupee, always appears in this youthful state
within the artist’s smaller-scale reliquaries and boxes.
Catherine appears frozen in time, doubly so encased behind glass.
Such work can be seen as a set of memorials to childhood, elegies for
innocence lost. The artist's sister is in costume, dressed like a
little angel, a winged archer or a ballerina. These portraits are
archetypal. They also hint at rebirth, in their display of
scarabs - an ancient icon of regeneration - as a recurring
element. And, the autobiographical dimension of these works gives
them added poignancy. Boccaccio's sister is a clinical
schizophrenic, unable to care for herself as an adult. "I never
knew her in a normal way," the artist recalled in a 1999
interview. These works are surely therapeutic for the artist but
they are much more than that. In Boccaccio's exacting use of
materials and in her eye for symbol and arresting image, she gives
common symbols like angels and hearts a fresh life. Hers is a
picture of pain and its transcendence.
Poeter's contribution to the show is a depiction of, as the title of
her room-size installation announces,"Generaciones." She means to
suggest the flow of human life through time and has devised a
remarkably vivid image of this rather abstract concept.
White Shirts, blouses, pants - large and small - form a continuous
stream across the length of the room. She has suspended them above the
floor and fastened them to and through vertical screens of sheer
cloth. 'Generaciones' is both simple in its overall effect and
full of complexity in its details. The screens are like markers
on a timeline, the horizontal flow of surrogate figures akin to the
longer stretch of time. It is a philosophical work that wears its
ideas lightly and appeals mightily to the senses.
- Robert L. Pincus
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