Betye Saar - "Cage"

While in New York in December, my art pal Binnie and I visited the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery to see Betye Saar's show "Cage," a new series of assemblages and collages that were contained in or referenced vintage cages. The cages referred directly to the imprisonment and ocean transport of African slaves. Saar is, of course, known for her political transformation of demeaning images of Black people. She has also explored gender, spirituality and family histories in her work. One of the notable facets of her life, aside from or perhaps directly related to her own art making, is that she and her husband (an art conservator and ceramist) raised three daughters - two artists and a writer - who carry on their family tradition of creative work.

A work in the "Cage" exhibition

Note: I was able to locate images of Saar's work from an article in Curated Magazine by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, but the article has no information on titles, sizes or materials.

Saar herself is of mixed race and has said the following about her use of racial motifs or provocative images:

"I think that was my way of responding to what was happening in the United States and the treatment of the blacks in the South and also a reaction to the death of Martin Luther King. I had previously started to collect derogatory black images, and I recycled them into my work to express rage or pain or just how I felt about this country politically." (quoted in Betye Saar: Extending the Frozen Moment)

Saar, a native Californian, is currently a vibrant 84 year old and lived through the civil rights movement. She began using racial images in the late 1960s after witnessing the 1965 race riots in Watts, the assassination of Dr. King in 1968 and the 1960s emerging women's and black arts movemenst. By the early 1970s, she had produced more than 20 pieces of politically and racially powerful works, including what is probably her best known work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.

The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972, mixed media assemblage, 11 3/4" x 8" x 2 3/4".

About this work, Saar has said, "My intent was to transform a negative, demeaning figure into a positive, empowered woman..., a warrior ready to combat servitude and racism."

Perhaps we (and by "we" I mean especially white people) in the United States thought that racial stereotyping and demeaning images were far behind us, but with the campaign and election of President Obama, we have learned, to what must be our shame and regret, that the images and the racial discrimination behind them are still very much present in our society. These images are part of our history and Saar wants us to remember them, not in terms of their victimization of a race, but "to reveal the human complexity which stereotypes are intended to conceal." (Ralph Ellison, introduction to Invisible Man, 1981.)

Betye Saar, 2006, with three of her works.

Saar has used photographs extensively in her work, discussed at length in Betye Saar: Extending the Frozen Moment. She is inspired by photographs that she finds at swap meets, garage sales, thrift shops and antique fairs, to create a context for the people pictured that allows her imagination and wonderful eye to combine objects and finds from many sources into her unique assemblages. These new artworks present "counter-images of African American life--images of dignity, pride, success and beauty." (Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, 2002). Saar also aims to capture what feels like history but is not located in a specific time or place.

Midnight Madonna, 1996, mixed-media assemblage, 14" x 11" x 1 l/2"

Birds of a Feather, 2010. Mixed media collage on paperboard 12 3/4″ x 12″

Betye Saar is a master of assemblage who has brought together some amazing objects and composed them into a new life. I greatly respect her transformative work with the racial images and her evocative use of found photographs. However, many of her boxes relate to those of Joseph Cornell, and like his work, I feel that they sometimes fail to achieve a certain beefy materiality that appeals to me. That is, I think they honor the found object too much to the detriment of the composition; they fail to manipulate the objects enough to make them lose their individual identity.

For my sensibility, Betye Saar's daughters, Lezley and Alison Saar, have taken their mother's work and really carried it forward. While many of their works also reference race and identity, they have a different take on it than their mother. But see what you think...

Lezley Saar - I think this is "Identify Crisis"

Lezley Saar installation at "I Feel Different," a current exhibition in Los Angeles

Lezley Saar - "Saint Anastacia," a blue-eyed, biracial saint revered in Brazil

Alison Saar, "Blood/Sweat/Tears," 2005, wood, copper, bronze, paint and tar, 72"x24"x20"

Alison Saar, "Discord," 2009, wool, steel, fiberglass, coal and styrofoam, 104"x40"x40"

Alison Saar - Harriet Tubman statue entitled "Swing Low", front view, public installation in Harlem

Harriet Tubman, rear view (Tubman images courtesy of Forgotten New York blog)

xx

Icons - Part Two

I saw the work of Annette Messager and Lorna Simpson at the Museum of Modern Art in Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, still on view until March 2011. This was an extensive show that brought together many well-known photographs from photography's early history to the present. I chose to write about these two works because they combine sculptural elements with photography and the works are driven by feminist considerations such as identity and women's roles in society.


Annette Messager

Annette Messager, My Vows, 1988-91, photographs, colored graphite on paper, string, black tape and pushpins over black paper or black synthetic polymer paint.

Messager is a French artist, born in 1943, best known for her installations rather than for photography alone. She works in various mediums including found stuffed animals, puppets, textiles and photography of men and women. The striking installation of the small photographs in My Vows is what attracted me to the work. The string pushpinned to the wall that suspends the photos from above is such an active part of the work and reminded me of a chandelier.

Side view of the work

Perhaps you can see better in this photo that the small photos overlap against the wall and are formed into a circle by the length of the hanging strings.

The individual photos are body parts and repeated words written in colored pencil. Two of the words that I could decipher were (in French) "silence" and "pain."

A New York Times review of Messager's work from 2007 states that Messager's intention with her work is "to free women from the roles assigned to them by men, by the marketplace, and by society. And she tries to do so through satire and caricature, using the images and materials of everyday life." 

An earlier exhibition of her work at MoMA stated that through fragmentation of images and language, Messager explores fictional storytelling that refers to the dialogue between individual and collective identity. Her work "forcefully illustrates the idea that all things -- a child's beloved toy, a photograph, a piece of embroidery, a word with seemingly unambiguous meaning -- can be transformed into objects of potent expression."

Messager shows mainly in Europe but with Marian Goodman Gallery in New York.

Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson, Wigs (Portfolio), 1994: portfolio of 21 lithographs on felt, with 17 lithographed felt text panels.

This was another striking piece in the show that drew me to it because of the smooth, creamy felt panels with the interesting portrayal of wigs. (The whole piece is maybe 4-5' tall by 10' wide. Each one of the wigs is roughly life size as you'll see in a later image.)  

I have long been interested in hair as a cultural element, particularly for women, and have made work about it and from it myself. Additionally, I surmised that Lorna Simpson, whom I knew to be African American, had even more issues regarding hair and culture. 

Lorna Simpson is American, born 1960, and a photographer who has usually combined her photographs with text. Working mostly in large-format studio photographs, she has chosen textual fragments that allow free association of the images with racial and sexual issues. That is, reading the text loads the images with content and associations that change the viewer's perceptions of the images.

Some of the wigs pictured in this portfolio appear to be made from Black hair and some from White hair. The text alludes to the wigs as a means of disguise, sexual attraction and an aid to crossing over gender, class and racial boundaries.

However, in this work, I found the text to be less important than the images of the wigs and their geometric arrangement on the felt panels.

In fact, I thought that the text ranged over so much territory that it was difficult to interpret Simpson's intention with this work. I actually think that the two little text panels above express her mixed feelings about it all. They say, "strong desire to decipher" and "strong desire to blur."

Perhaps it's true that hair has so many associations connected to it that it's impossible to make a succinct statement about it all.

This is the shot I really liked with the viewer in front of the work looking like she stepped right out of it.

Simpson has had a distinguished career that includes a 20-year retrospective at the Whitney in 2007, being collected by the National Gallery, MoMA, the Whitney and other top-rung museums. She also has the distinction of being the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Bienniale - disappointingly not until 1997. You can see more of Simpson's work here.