Assemblage and the Black American Experience
Torrance Brown
How can assemblage art and large mixed media works serve as a medium to articulate the profound nuances of the Black American experience? This question has been eloquently addressed by both Noah Purifoy and Mark Bradford through their assemblage creations, achieving a significant impact. The complex and intersectional experiences of African Americans, the LGBTQ+ community, and the economically disadvantaged often collide in a manner that is both loud and demanding of attention. This overlap highlights the interchangeable nature of the challenges these groups face. Assemblage art stands out as a distinctive approach to sculpture, aiming to draw from everyday life and amalgamate these elements into collage-like structures that elicit varied responses from viewers. These artists craft three-dimensional collages that articulate the obstacles encountered in their personal experiences.
The primary aim of assemblage art is to repurpose or recontextualize discarded items found in daily life, thereby crafting an entirely new visual narrative. This process offers a fresh perspective on familiar objects, reimagining them within a novel context. Such a method has garnered particular interest among contemporary African American artists, for whom a single canvas may not suffice to fully express or communicate their complex ideas. While canvas paintings are confined to two dimensions and allow for visual interaction, they do not inhabit our three-dimensional reality. The tangible combination of varied objects in assemblage art creates a harmony that invites viewers to dismantle and reassemble their understanding of the artist’s message. This interaction with the assemblages offers a deeper level of engagement than merely observing them on a canvas.
One particularly moving assemblage that nicely encapsulates this idea is Strange Fruit: Channel 42 by Thornton Dial. The words of Nina Simone in her song of the same name echo through your mind when looking at this artwork. You see a figure, wearing tattered, torn, almost bloody-looking clothes hanging from what appears to be a television antenna, mouth agape and dressed in formal attire. Dial often used torn and destroyed pieces of clothing to instill in viewers a taste of the pain and mistreatment that Black Americans have had to face at almost every turn since the height of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, from the very moment our ancestors were stripped from their homes, and had their cultures bastardized and frowned upon. With his use of the television antenna as a sort of modern-day lynching tree, Dial also sought to expose his feelings on modern Western media. How often do those in positions of power, who have created the very problems marginalized communities seek to destroy and dismantle, end up positioning themselves in a light that seeks to have people prop them up on a pedestal as saviors of these groups? When choosing to hang this figure from such a display, he calls for the death of these ideas, a dismantling of these false idols and pedestals, to look at them for what they really are and the harm that they bring to the subjects they think they save. This point is made more personal when you think about how this is a problem Thornton, and many artists like him, must face when they come to terms with the true nature of the art world and the Western world in general. Many such cases of greed and a false sense of being an idol and savior have resulted in many Black artists of the time simply not being paid what they’re worth or treated as actual people with true stories to tell and ideas with depth to display.
Strange Fruit: Channel 42, 2003, Thornton Dial
Another work that I feel perfectly encapsulates this narrative of predatory greed is Noah Purifoy’s work No Contest. The work presents two bikes on a house-like structure, one turned upright and one that is upside-down, with the upside-down bike being weighed down to the right. The positioning of the bikes in this piece can be used to think about how Black Americans are brought into this world with less than nothing at times and must work twice as hard as their White counterparts, being represented by the right-side-up bike, to even taste half of the available material pleasures. The way these bikes are positioned to look almost like a scale can also call back to how in America, the suffering and denying of these pleasures is exactly what can prop up White Americans in the first place.
No Contest by Noah Purifoy
Though assemblage work is very impactful in getting its broad points and ideas across, mixed media works are also as grand in scale and just as effective in communicating their ideas. We see this particularly in the works of Mark Bradford, who has a few recent exhibitions and displays that I want to take time to discuss. Bradford is a queer artist born in 1961 and based out of California whose works mainly focuses on the objectification of the bodies and experiences of marginalized communities. Often, themes of death and rebirth are used to get these points across, which I found particularly impressive in some of these pieces. Though his art uses traditional materials they are never used in a traditional way, oftentimes using different tools and materials found in the everyday that are then used to construct and deconstruct the pieces he makes. Another favored technique of his is using these materials to create large sculptures that seem to beautifully disrupt the spaces they are placed in, extremely loud and very proud, much like Bradford’s celebration of his own identity as a Queer Black Artist.
One particularly impactful piece that I feel gets this point across nicely is Bradford’s installation entitled Spoiled Foot. This is a large mass, seen hanging from the ceiling, that was created by layering many different commercial prints of paper, likely coming from advertisements on posters he found around his area, that have been pressure hosed to the point of near-complete distortion and hung in a way where there is barely space to move around, save for the outer margins of the gallery. The use of these commercially printed posters in such a way calls back to the commodification and misuse of marginalized bodies and forces the viewer to navigate around these situations. He wanted this instillation to take up most of the center space so that it could prevent viewers from coming in with the notion that this space was available, much like how Black and Queer people in America have been faced with times where they barely had space to maneuver around their obstacles but still were able to find a way. This piece in particular echoes some of the struggles that these specific communities faced at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that tore through Gay communities across the country, as well as the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — an event that to this day has left many Black communities in New Orleans displaced and their homes waterlogged beyond repair. These struggles are loud and disruptive, but at the end of the day they are the reality, and to Bradford, if one cannot view what is simply an analogy of a true human experience, one would never be able to accurately view and sympathize with the struggles that certain communities face effectively.
Spoiled Foot, by Mark Bradford
When it comes to the large-scale ideas that assemblage, sculpture, and mixed multi-media artworks often take on, it makes a lot of sense that they’re often used as vessels to express such universal and unique ideas. To me, there is a sense of connectivity or a full circle moment that comes out of feeling that traditional tools, media, and approaches aren’t enough to express the thoughts that people who come from these specific walks of life have on the world around them. I always try and speak to the idea that those who have had to deal with the grunt work of meeting societal expectations, while simultaneously not existing in bodies that reflect society’s ‘standards’, do not need to lay down and completely take more blows without ever having attempted to muster enough strength to hit back. For some, this means protests, peaceful or otherwise, while for others this may mean using silence and an inability to conform to certain expectations as their means of yelling into the void that causes the pain. For many Black creatives though, this is the way they express themselves, and express the hurt that they may have felt they couldn’t do anything with except sit there and reflect inwardly on it — but this is what makes creativity and a need to express art so beautiful. It allows those who sit in the margins of such places to create something beautiful from the pain, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. This phoenix, to me, is liberation. Liberation for the creators, their families, the friends they still have and no longer know because of societal expectations, and for those who can view their works in full glory at an exhibition. The beauty of this sense of rebirth will continue to echo out into the void and reverberate until the fragile glass cradle of a twisted society finally shatters and crumbles into nothing, leaving endless bounds of creativity and reparation in its wake.
References:
Robinson, Shantay. ‘Assemblage: Surpassing the Original Intent.’ Blackartinamerica.Com, 8 Nov. 2023, Assemblage: Surpassing the Original Intent. Accessed 11 Dec. 2023.
Dozier, Ayanna. ‘Mark Bradford Examines Vulnerability and Resilience across New Abstractions.’ Artsy.Net, 21 Apr. 2023, www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-mark-bradford-examines-vulnerability-resilience-new-abstractions. Accessed 11 Dec. 2023.
Vikram, Anuradha. ‘The Art of Unrest: The Political Undertones of Noah Purifoy and Mark Bradford.’ Pbssocal.Org, 20 Jul. 2015, www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/the-art-of-unrest-the-political-undertones-of-noah-purifoy-and-mark-bradford. Accessed 11 Dec. 2023.
Slipek, Edwin. ‘American Artist Mark Bradford Offers a Withering Take on the State of the U.S. With a Destroyed Twin to a Virginia Landmark.’ M.Styleweekly.Com, 12 Sept. 2017, m.styleweekly.com/richmond/american-artist-mark-bradford-offers-a-withering-take-on-the-state-of-the-us-with-a-destroyed-twin-to-a-virginia-landmark/Content?oid=4583182. Accessed 11 Dec. 2023.
Muelrath, Forrest Muelrath. ‘Thornton Dial and Looking Good for the Price.’ Hyperallergic.Com, 6 Aug. 2018, hyperallergic.com/454102/thornton-dial-and-looking-good-for-the-price/. Accessed 11 Dec. 2023.