From Social Deviance to Art: Vandalism, Illicit Dumping, and the Transformation of Matter and Form

In this article, assemblage art is presented to visually underscore social discourse relevant to urban vandalism and illegal dumping. The waste emergency, brought about, in part, also by illegal dumping and littering, is experienced on a daily basis across the globe in industrialized and less-industrialized countries alike. Likewise, vandalism is so pervasive in some areas that we have come to normalize it as intrinsic to urban life. The pieces presented here serve as attention-inducers. Destroyed or dumped things are assembled into new forms which symbolically and “totemically” represent [contemporary] collective identity. While the poetics of the art presented is not political, nor was the art created for social purposes, its social impact or social and criminological connection with deviance is a consequence of the “where” the assembled parts were found. The matter collected is transformed and its shapes and its source can now be seen and confronted, rather than avoided. Broken parts become a new whole, and also herein lies another symbolic connection with the world of deviance as far as the obvious possibility for change and transformation, relevant to broken lives and broken communities.

CHIMERICAL (The Art of Assemblage)

Kemampuan ‘menghubung-kaitkan’ sesuatu dengan sesuatu yang lain merupakan sebuah kreativitas yang tidak datang begitu saja. Kemampuan tersebut merupakan ‘anugerah yang dilatih’, yang kemudian ditekuni penulis hingga terciptalah karya-karya assemblage-art, Assemblage merupakan sebuah teknik mengumpulkan berbagai macam media, kemudian mengkonstruksi dan merakitnya menjadi sebuah karya seni. Anugerah tersebut sudah dilatih sejak usia anak-anak di mana saat itu penulis menyadari ketidak mampuannya untuk memiliki berbagai macam mainan yang diinginkan anak-anak pada umumnya, sehingga ‘terdesak’ untuk menciptakan mainan sendiri dengan merakit benda-benda yang ditemukan. Kegemaran merakit benda temuan tersebut berlangsung hingga usia dewasa, yang kemudian dikembangkan dengan menambahkan sebuah muatan konsep atau pesan-pesan tertentu.Istilah Chimera dipilih penulis untuk mewakili ciri khas kekaryaannya baik dalam proses penciptaan hingga hasil akhir. Menggabung-gabungkan berbagai jenis makhluk hidup sebagai tema dari wujud karya dan menggabung-gabungkan berbagai jenis benda temuan sebagai metode dalam proses penciptaan karya seni. Chimera merupakan istilah populer yang digunakan untuk menyebutkan sesuatu yang ‘dikawin-silangkan’, kemudian dipilihlah istilah lanjutan yaitu Chimerical yang berarti sesuatu yang memiiki sifat-sifat menggabung-gabungkan.Kata kunci: Assemblage, Chimerical dan benda temuan

Re/entangling Irish and Nigerian diasporas: Colonial amnesias, decolonial aesthetics and archive-assemblage praxis

This article discusses the practice of ‘genealogical re/entanglement’ developed in the context of a project about the ways colonial amnesias obscure the connections between the histories of Anglo-European colonialities and the crises of contemporary migrations. This methodology appropriates archival and assemblage art making practices to make visible and ‘familialise’ the prior encounters of Irish and Nigerian diasporans that remain unknown in Ireland, towards reshaping the grounds of present and future relations. The centrality of embodied knowledges in decolonial scholarship creates an imperative of not only grounding theoretical work in the materialities of lived experiences but also confronting the colonial inheritances that underpin the methods employed to engage them. As such, in the contexts of this project, the development of the methodology became a project in itself. In this article, I reflect on the decolonial interrogations and method(il)logical transfigurations of the Western art and research traditions that intersected with and co-constructed the substantive analysis of Irish and Nigerian diasporic entanglements. An interactive account of how the method operates provides an opportunity to explore the ways the interconnectedness of the aesthesic, epistemological and pedagogical projects underpinning decolonial work combine to constitute a dynamic praxis.

Pastoral Bric-a-brac: Joseph Cornell’s Artistic Responses to Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes

It has become a staple when Joseph Cornell’s art is analyzed and commented on to mention the novel Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) by Alain-Fournier. The novel is referred to many times in Cornell’s diaries and projects. It is well-known that Joseph Cornell felt a strong attachment to anything French (especially from the fin-de-siècle period), but such is too broad an explanation for his interest on that particular novel. In this article we analyze the bond between Cornell’s art and Alain-Fournier’s novel, taking them as two artistic examples of the pastoral mode. We try to explicate the connection between Alain-Fournier’s novel and many of Cornell’s most relevant assemblage boxes, such as the Palace series, the Medici Slot Machine boxes and Untitled (Bébé Marie). This relation can be traced both in the themes and the assemblage technique used by Cornell: they seem to replicate Meaulnes’s experiences during the narration in the novel, and to reproduce, with Cornell’s use of the glass panel, the narrative strategies of denouement delay that Alain-Fournier employed in Le Grand Meaulnes.Keywords: Joseph Cornell, Alain-Fournier, pastoral, art and literature relation, assemblage art.