Description
This assemblage is built within a seven-inch-deep desk drawer with two lightbulbs mounted to windows in the back that illuminate the interior. The interior is subdivided into several sections by shelves, mirrored partitions, and a central pillar. The main square pillar is collaged with an etching illustration of a room crowded with seventeenth-century men. This pillar has a white string attached to its top that extends down the left front bottom of the box where it is held tight with a metal spring. Extending to the left from the middle of the column is a clear tube containing a bundle of wires of various colors. Atop this tube is a slab of glass acting as a shelf and holding a key, two game pieces, and a die. Above and to the rear of this glass shelf is a corner shelf collaged on the edge with an abstract painting and on the bottom with a map. This shelf holds a stack of five small dice and a metal winding mechanism. In this corner section, several objects are glued to the wall and ceiling, including a game piece, a bedspring, and metal rings. The background of this corner is collaged with a comic book drawing of a woman’s face, a section from a Josef Albers painting, and a black-and-white photo of a mountain landscape. This shelf is supported by a plastic yellow toy block. Beneath the shelf, in the left corner, is a white bishop chess piece that rests atop a rectangular gum eraser. The left side background is covered with a color illustration of Earth featuring a close-up inset of a volcano, and beneath that is a black-and-white photo of a snow-covered mountain.
In the back right corner of this assemblage is a small angled shelf set atop a mirrored panel. On this shelf is a white game piece with a partitioned construction that houses a mirror. The left side of this partition unit is covered with color illustrations identifying various flowers. Below the mirror is a color photo of waves on a rocky beach. Suspended on a string in front of the mirror is a red plastic toy pterodactyl. Collaged on the right side wall in this corner is a color photo of the top of a fiery volcano. Fronting this right corner section is a top-to-bottom narrow panel and a broken pane of glass. The panel features a black-and-white photo of a small wooded island on a lake, and pasted over that is a clipping from a dictionary of the definition of the word image. On this same panel beneath the photo is a plastic ruler featuring lenticular 3-D color illustrations depicting aspects of space flight. The forward section of the right side of the assemblage is collaged with a photo of birch trees.
The central floor of the assemblage is a stage that floats a few inches over the actual bottom of the box and is constructed of playing cards and a corner section of mirror. Upon the stage is the aforementioned central pillar along with a tube collaged with a painting by Arcimboldo to the left, and a radio vacuum tube to the right back of the pillar. Mounted behind the pillar is a green plastic army soldier.
The bottom of the box is mostly obscured by this stage. The viewable part of the bottom is covered with a collage of a painting by Kandinsky, and resting upon it are a marble, a game piece, and two mirrored panels. Glued to one of these panels is the A tile from a Scrabble game.
The inside back of this assemblage is a hodgepodge of images. From left to right are a section of a Bruegel painting, a dark etching of a figure from a Renaissance painting, a color illustration of an outdoor crowd of eighteenth-century folks, a black-and-white photo of a snow-covered mountain, and a comic book drawing of a closeup of a man’s eyes and forehead with a thought bubble declaring, “Dead . . . for days. Then Decker couldn’t have done it!” Among this collage of images is an opaque glass pane that covers a light bulb mounted to the top back of the box. Attached to the underside of this glass pane is a narrow glass shelf holding another Scrabble tile, this one the letter H.
The inside top of this assemblage is also an assortment of collaged images. From left to right, these are a pen drawing of a termite queen, a section of Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase, an etching illustration of a dying Joan of Arc, a comic book panel of a woman in a room with a lamp and a telephone, and a black-and-white photo of a forest. The two objects mounted to the ceiling are a toy rubber truck tire and the inner reed section of a harmonica.
The front frame of this box is collaged with color illustrations of World War One battle scenes. This frame leaves a small gap at the bottom that is taken up by a panel collaged with a section of map and comic book illustrations of characters being attacked by a giant eagle and a large black cat. A block of wood at the bottom front of the box supporting the front glass pane is collaged with a map of the Indian Ocean.
Thoughts
As the earliest boxed assemblage that I’ve posted to my website, I’d like to frame this Thoughts section with a historian’s convention of breaking up an artist’s works into time periods: early, middle, and late. I think this will make it easier to talk about this piece, which has little stylistic resemblance to my current work. One would assume that, since this is one of my boxed assemblages, it might have at least some bearing on my work overall, and yet placing it in my early period, as one of my first attempts, we can see it as distant and separate from my contemporary work. I completed about a half-dozen boxed assemblages in 1990, and my recollection is that Palace was one of the last ones finished that year. In retrospect, I can see that many of the ideas of the first few assemblages percolated up through to fruition with Palace. You could say that this piece is the high-water mark among my very first boxed assemblages.
If you’ve only seen my later work, you might even think this early piece had been done by a different artist. In fact, if I reflect back on my life, I could convince myself that, from the perspective of psychological and social development, I was perhaps occupying an alternate persona as compared to myself thirty-four years later. My first few years of making boxed assemblages overlapped with my last year of art studies at university, and I was fresh from my enthusiasm for post-modernist philosophies and post-structuralist criticism. As I mentioned on my Substack subscription, in my introduction to this Substack, I had intuitively turned to this medium because it fulfilled my aesthetic principles in a way that felt perfect. I think, at the time, I sensed the power of using found images, but it would take years of steeping myself in their element before I became aware of the medium’s prodigious potential.
My earliest work was, in some respect, social commentary on television, with the dimensions of these early boxes consciously in the shape of the smaller TV sets of the time. Part of my goal was like television broadcasts, to offer up an endless supply of disparate images. These early pieces weren’t so much of a theme as a celebration of the idea of assemblage itself, a cornucopia of ideas. This early work was also a time of exhilaration with past images that I was discovering through a constant flow of books, magazines, and objects acquired at thrift stores, which at the time I even referred to as “my art supply stores.” I was also full of playfulness and fascination with these things of my recent cultural past that had me fully engaged with wonder. Not to say that I’m not this way now, but this was my boxed assemblage “honeymoon period.”
Shortly following this piece, I began work on my self-designed master’s degree project, a series of art zines, Practical Knowledge. In retrospect, I can see there was a shift away from a barrage of images toward a focused narrative. So I might say that post-Palace there was a style shift, and this marked the start of my late-early period that would go on for another decade until my middle period, where thematic and smaller works were the rule, as I alluded to in my previous Substack on the transitional piece Façade. The other thing distinguishing this early period for me is that there seems to be less that resonates for me at my present distance from the work. But while the way I applied imagery is radically different from what I do now, there are some construction elements in this early piece, such as wrapping a cylinder and the use of mirrors, that you’ll still see in present-day work.
I remember when, as a teenager, I learned to downhill ski. For the first year or two it was all about a borderline out-of-control breakneck speed, barreling down the hill. Thrilling for sure and a style of its own, but lacking any refinement. A few ski seasons later, I was able to skillfully maneuver and perform freestyle moves. This may be a generalization of an ordinary developmental process where there is a shift from imbalance to equilibrium, but what stands out most for me when I look at my early work is how my creative process has gone from exuberant with new ideas to more focused and contemplative.
