Moving well beyond their avant-garde years

BOONE, N.C.-The techniques of collage and assemblage are both about 100 years old, although the latter didn’t get its name until about 50 years ago. The third large group exhibition at Appalachian State University’s year-old Turchin Center for the Visual Arts demonstrates that these art practices remain alive and well in the early years of a new millennium.

“Sum of the Parts: Assemblage and Collage,” on view in the center’s Rosen galleries through May 29, consists of about 130 pieces by 14 contemporary artists who make collages, assemblages or both. They are essentially three- and two-dimensional manifestations of the same approach, in that both rely largely on the use of found, often fragmentary materials – objects in the case of assemblage, images and/or texts in that of collage.

The Turchin Center’s previous exhibit, “The Omnipotent Dream,” last fall brought together collages, assemblages and other workds by Man Ray and some of his dadaist and surrealist peers of the early 20th century. That show – curated, like this one, by the center’s director/curator Hank Foreman – was a reminder that assemblage and collage began as avant – garde strategies intended to subvert visual conventions and offend bourgeois sensibilities by bringing low-culture imagery and non-art materials into the art arena.

By 1970, assemblage and collage had become modernist traditions. But if they have lost their inherent shock value, they have nonetheless retained their viability as art practices in the postmodern, post-millennial era, as this show demonstrates.

Many works here hark back visually to early modernist predecessors. For example, the late Rick Horton’s intimately scaled collages from the 1970’s are reminiscent of those made by pioneer collagist Kurt Schwitters in that they consist largely of typographic fragments and are characterized by lively interplays of color and abstract shape.

Suzie Gablik, who is more widely known as an art critic, is represented by works, all from the late 1970’s, that might be accurately described as photomontages. In contrast to the fragmentary nature of the previously discussed works, Gablik’s are highly structured, typically dense compositions dominated by richly colored, nature-based photographic imagery apparently lifted from from print sources such as National Geographic.

These works celebrate the Earth’s ecological diversity and thereby implicitly critique the destructive impact that industry and technology have had on Earth. Ranging from 2-by-2 feet to slightly more that 3-4 feet in size, they are psychedelic in their profusion of richly colored imagery, and they stand as the show’s most visually compelling two-dimensional works.

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