Page 44 - Studio International - June 1971

3 Fred Brookes many boring imitations. The number of slimy
Installation shot, Serpentine Gallery 1971 or toady or pustule-covered things that we
Concrete blocks have had in the last thirty or forty years has
4 Philip Hicks
Boy at War 1971 become wearying to the extent that it's
Board, metal, fibreglass, oil 32 x 135 in. difficult to get kicks of any sort from e.g., (the
Event at Camden Arts Centre, London first things of many that come to mind)
5 Stuart Brisley
London in Berlin Now 1971 Paul Thek's Death of a Hippie, which was in the
6 Edward Kienholz Obsessive Image show, or Cohn Self's Atomic
The illegal Operation 1962 Mixed media Victim, all blackened and cracked with radiation.
Courtesy: Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
Photo: Walter Drayer There are a lot of imitation corpses around in
7 Edward Kienholz assemblage art these days, more than there used
Birthday 1964 Mixed media to be, with Thek, Bruce Conner (good name),
Courtesy: Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
Photo: Walter Drayer Beuys's hare, and all the rest—and that hare
reminds me that assemblage got that way
through its early recourse, and frequent
revisits, to the taxidermist. John
Heartfield's capitalist hyena (1932), the desert
dog wearing a top hat and stalking over dead
men amid barbed wire, was photomontaged and
thus not actual, but it may well have
encouraged the widespread ios and 4os feral
imagery for the capitalist and warmonger, in
which class of men there were in any event
well-attested cases of lycanthropy. A legitimate
political point, I feel, but apart from politics
the sudden onrush of taxidermy taught the
assemblagists of nasty sensations that the use of
the feral was the way to get real dead things into
art.
All children fear the taxidermist—his clean
hands, his age, his nicotine-stained moustache,
the smell. He prefers his subject fresh from
field or river, but he's not fussy. The belly is
split, and he pulls everything out, scrapes and
rinses; he does the same with the head. The
eyes are a difficulty, but taxidermists have
their special tools. He glues in coloured glass.
The body is crammed with tight wadding and
he stitches and sews the long wound like any
surgeon.
The hollowed corpse is now ready for its
incorporation into an art situation. Meret
Oppenheim did it with his Squirrel, as Brauner
did it with his Wolf-Table. So did many others,
most of them Germans; any Dada picture
book will immediately show you a lot more.
France and Spain were lighter on this kind of
effect. Picabia's stuffed monkey was actually a
toy one, and Miró's Objet Poétique has a parrot
that seems quite lively, as if it could take off.
fashioning what will give pleasure to children. artistic intelligence—those little tassels !—and Cornell, however, preferred to keep his parrots
Thus the look of things that don't have the the slight jokes of too much later work; all those in a glass box, his cardboard cut-outs in this
look of being destined for fame and eternity, things like the toy-car-headed gorilla. case representing a trompe l'oeil of the real
that will never be totally comfortable when Anything that comes near to being toy-like dead thing, just as his pharmacy cases fooled
exhibited, things that one doesn't have to is eminently handleable, which may be one expectations of pharmacy's living function, to
handle with care, on which new paint and neat reason why so much work of this sort gets put in heal. A nun invented barbed wire, and I
joints seem too official. Much assemblage has transparent boxes. On the other matrix of happen to know that many pharmacists are
this feeling about it. Moderate in scale and size assemblage though, on the nasty and frightful taxidermists in their spare time; they have all
(Oldenburg's sudden switch to the colossal side, is a considerable tradition of things that the swabs and needles ready. Rauschenberg's
was imaginative and unprecedented), its rough cognately are totally untouchable, but make the Canyon seems to me to be the best
edges, seeping glue and uncareful paint, have a fingers' nerve-ends itch for just that reason. taxidermical painting, its great eagle like a
feeling of playfulness which shouldn't beguile Meret Oppenheim's furry cup set an early warning but also like an affirmation that his
one from considerations of quality. In standard in this respect, all the more so since humanism can include the wide black
Picasso, to take the most obvious instance, what there are a lot of easy effects to be had in this wings and their shadow.
a difference there is between the construction of area, especially if you mix it in with the erotic, All this is by way of introduction to the
1921 which has recently arrived at the Tate, as in Giacometti's Disagreeable Object of 1931, Kienholz exhibition at the ICA— until July 18.
with its breath-taking désinvolture of pure which itself works well but has spawned too He is perhaps the most thoroughly
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