#1 ·
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the concept of "assemblage" in art, but not necessarily in the formal, museum sense. I mean the psychological aspect of it. You know, the idea that we can take these discarded, mundane, or even outright hostile objects from our past and stitch them together into something that actually makes sense of our present.
There is something deeply transformative about taking an object that was meant to signify something one way—maybe something meant to demean, or something that just felt "less than"—and physically rearranging it until it speaks a completely different language. It’s like a form of alchemy. You aren't just making "art"; you're performing a sort of exorcism on the items that used to carry heavy, negative weight.
I remember walking through a flea market a few years ago in a particularly old part of town. I saw this collection of old, rusted kitchen utensils and broken ceramic figurines. Most people saw junk. They saw things that had outlived their utility. But as I sat there looking at them, I started imagining them as components of a larger story. If you took that rusted whisk and paired it with a piece of silk or a cracked porcelain eye, the entire "vibe" shifts. It moves from being a story of decay to a story of reconstruction.
It makes me wonder about the sheer courage it takes to do this on a grand scale. To look at the artifacts of a period of history that was designed to be oppressive, and instead of throwing them away or hiding them in a basement, you bring them into the light. You use them as the literal building blocks for a new identity. It’s one thing to write a poem about overcoming struggle, but it’s a whole other level of intensity to take the very tools of that struggle and turn them into a monument of victory. It’s a way of saying, "You tried to use this to define me, but I am using it to define myself."
In a broader sense, I think we all do a version of this in our daily lives. We take the "scraps" of our experiences—the failures, the outdated traditions, the leftovers of old ways of thinking—and we try to assemble them into a cohesive sense of self. We are all, in a way, assemblage artists of our own identities. We pick up pieces from our ancestors, pieces from our mistakes, and pieces from our triumphs, and we try to make a collage that doesn't feel like it's falling apart at the seams.
But there’s a tension there, isn't there? There is a risk in using those old, heavy objects. If you aren't careful, the weight of the original object can overwhelm the new meaning you're trying to create. You can get swallowed by the history of the material. How do you find that balance between acknowledging where something came from and asserting what it has become? How do you ensure the "new" message isn't just a shadow of the old one?
I’ve been feeling like our current culture is struggling with this. We are surrounded by "objects" and "symbols" from the past that feel incredibly heavy, and there seems to be a massive, ongoing debate about whether we should preserve them, discard them, or—as I find most fascinating—repurpose them entirely to tell a new story.
Do you think it's more powerful to create something entirely new from scratch, or is there more profound meaning in taking something broken and making it beautiful again?
There is something deeply transformative about taking an object that was meant to signify something one way—maybe something meant to demean, or something that just felt "less than"—and physically rearranging it until it speaks a completely different language. It’s like a form of alchemy. You aren't just making "art"; you're performing a sort of exorcism on the items that used to carry heavy, negative weight.
I remember walking through a flea market a few years ago in a particularly old part of town. I saw this collection of old, rusted kitchen utensils and broken ceramic figurines. Most people saw junk. They saw things that had outlived their utility. But as I sat there looking at them, I started imagining them as components of a larger story. If you took that rusted whisk and paired it with a piece of silk or a cracked porcelain eye, the entire "vibe" shifts. It moves from being a story of decay to a story of reconstruction.
It makes me wonder about the sheer courage it takes to do this on a grand scale. To look at the artifacts of a period of history that was designed to be oppressive, and instead of throwing them away or hiding them in a basement, you bring them into the light. You use them as the literal building blocks for a new identity. It’s one thing to write a poem about overcoming struggle, but it’s a whole other level of intensity to take the very tools of that struggle and turn them into a monument of victory. It’s a way of saying, "You tried to use this to define me, but I am using it to define myself."
In a broader sense, I think we all do a version of this in our daily lives. We take the "scraps" of our experiences—the failures, the outdated traditions, the leftovers of old ways of thinking—and we try to assemble them into a cohesive sense of self. We are all, in a way, assemblage artists of our own identities. We pick up pieces from our ancestors, pieces from our mistakes, and pieces from our triumphs, and we try to make a collage that doesn't feel like it's falling apart at the seams.
But there’s a tension there, isn't there? There is a risk in using those old, heavy objects. If you aren't careful, the weight of the original object can overwhelm the new meaning you're trying to create. You can get swallowed by the history of the material. How do you find that balance between acknowledging where something came from and asserting what it has become? How do you ensure the "new" message isn't just a shadow of the old one?
I’ve been feeling like our current culture is struggling with this. We are surrounded by "objects" and "symbols" from the past that feel incredibly heavy, and there seems to be a massive, ongoing debate about whether we should preserve them, discard them, or—as I find most fascinating—repurpose them entirely to tell a new story.
Do you think it's more powerful to create something entirely new from scratch, or is there more profound meaning in taking something broken and making it beautiful again?