The ‘Art’ of Assemblage
If it hasn’t already occurred to the viewer, my work here is an undisciplined, emotional-driven mess. It shouldn’t surprise that I walked away from an undergraduate degree in music composition and theory because I couldn’t bring myself to take the final requirement of ‘sight reading’, as ironic as that may now appear. Apparently as compulsive in capturing human speech as I am in capturing what I see, Joan Didion writes in On Keeping a Notebook, that in the compulsive recording of what surrounds us, “the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’” This shared fixation, she writes, is “about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.” And so perhaps my work here, this art of assemblage—the visual breaking of the world in bits and recombining them in unpredictable ways—reduces art to a fetishism that is atonal, atavistic, personal. It’s meaning hidden in a liminal, shifting space even from me.
