Betye Saar: Call and Response // Exhibition Walkthrough

Fetty Tsar is one of the great assemblage artists working today awesome Blas meaning that you assemble sculptural works out of found objects she is an inveterate collector she buys things that swap meets she has her favorite second-hand stores people give her things and she takes these objects that she has collected over literally a lifetime and she puts them together into these wonderful magical beautiful and really powerful objects she's based here in Southern California where she has lived her entire and very long life she is now 93 years old and still working in creating in her studio this exhibition Betty Saar call and response brings together for the first time some of Tsar's sketchbooks and the finished works that relate to the sketches in those sketchbooks Saar actually begins with an object she'll make sometimes one sketch sometimes multiple sketches for an object and then after she has made that sketch she doubles back to the object and she assembles the works it's really a series of calls and responses that we see in this exhibition in one of my many wonderful studio visits with Betty Sarah I had the pleasure of hearing her talk about this very process when I was at one of my local sources where I find material which is that the Pasadena City College in Pasadena California one of the guys that I usually find neat things from had this old wooden ironing board and the shape of the ironing board reminded me of the shape of a ship meaning the slave ship the diagram of the slave ship with all the slaves how they're situated in it I had used that before and I found it in a book about slavery but that's part of my visual language just like a black bird or a crow for Jim Crow or a Hannah by the hand for your fortune or something like that and some of the the other astrological signs but when I saw that I immediately got this idea I said oh that slaveship diagram would look really good on it and the shape of it was also like a tomb and a waiting like a casket so it had this kind of sad ominous feeling about it it just seemed to make a statement about like you get off the slave ship and then you're a slave and you wash and iron and clean or pick cotton or whatever you have to do so I bought that and then I had to enlarge the diagram in order to to fit that shape and then I looked around for a photograph of a woman ironing and I appropriated a photograph and then found a flat iron like my grandmother used to where you would have to heat him on a stove and then iron and from the iron to the ironing board I made this rusty chain for me that told the story okay but then I thought about I would hang a sheet behind it to make a make it more like a tableau or a little scene rather than just an isolated ironing board out there so a young a rope for a clothesline and had some old wooden clothespin and hung this white sheet but on that sheet I used the initials KKK because to me it said okay the KKK is against African American Americans against slaves also other groups and religions and so forth but I meant it specifically for for black people and I thought isn't it ironic that the woman who irons a sheet that the KKK person wears is a black woman as a slave and that kind of inter dependency of what goes on between the two groups then I had to think of a title I go through my little sketchbooks and I've probably found that title there I'll bend but I will not break and that see to imply the pickup the political message that I want to do that you can treat me as a slave and I'll bend down up and down to pick cotton I'll bend down to do this and to be a laborer but I will not break sorry and her work focuses on three themes race gender and spirituality when we look at this amazing piece a loss of innocence we really see a focus on both race and hinting at a focus on gender this is a work thats are made out of a found christening dress you see underneath the hanging dress there is a little chair and there's this sense of purity and of innocence but then when you start to look more closely at the work you start to see the dark underside of childhood and the notion of the loss of childhood innocence and the role that race plays in this loss of innocence this is a work for which Tsar made a number of sketches over a couple of years the earliest sketch from April of 1996 talks about a pale pink dress so perhaps a different dress from the one that she actually wound up using she also mentions the possibility of including butterflies for Tsar a butterfly is the symbol that shows up in some of her other works she first talks about wanting to have the little chair be a spirit chair referring to the spirit trees or bottle trees that come out of the Congo civilization in Africa where people literally hang glass bottles from trees and use them to ward off evil spirits and so she was going to adapt that to a small chair and you can see in the sketchbook there's a drawing of a chair with a with four bottles at the top of the chair back she then changed that in a later sketch from December of 1997 into the small cap chair that we see today and if you look carefully at that chair you'll see at the top there's a very small mirror and I think this mirror plays the role of the glass bottles and that it reflects light and will reflect back evil spirits and protect the person sitting in the chair in the latest sketch from March of 1998 we see the reference to the fabric labels with the epithets and she makes a note to herself to order the labels on this sketch we see in these sketches sort of the thought process that she's going through and the evolution of the work as it becomes what we see in front of us today the next piece we'll look at is a call to arms from 1997 a call to arms incorporates a used washboard made by the National washboard company and we still see the word national on the washboard she's covered up the word washboard and written in their racism so immediately this washboard doesn't only conjure up women's labor but it conjures up black labor as well so you see at the very top brush doll literally made out of a little brush a broom this doll has her arms out and these arms are actually made out of bullets the two spindles on either side of the brush doll are literally that they're spindles they look like classical columns but in fact they are from thread that would have been used in a textile factory and then on top of these two spindles we see a black power fist with wonderful silver nail polish and so again sort of the the powerful fist with a very female attribute of the nail polish there is a compass underneath that that may speak to the notion of a moral compass and in fact in that same section we see the names Memphis and Chicago that were actually part of the original washboard which Saar has highlighted the National washboard company had offices both in Memphis and in Chicago but those are also the sites of major events related to race in American history then at the bottom is a quote from a poem by Langston Hughes that says I've been a victim the Belgians caught off my hands in the Congo they lynched me in Texas so again bringing in the notion of racism that this is not just national racism but it's international racism the sketch for a call to arms I think really shows us how SAR will take the or form which in this case is the washboard and then she makes very specific notes to herself of all the components that she wants to add to it so you see the reference to the brush doll the spindles the clock the compass the guns the quote from Langston Hughes she also references things that she doesn't include so here she mentions the possibility of including globes on top of the spindles rather than the black power fists so you can see how she works out ideas in these sketches in relation to the original object that spoke to her this work is sanctuary awaits of 1996 it is one of a three-part piece each part being an independent sculpture this piece really speaks to czars interest in spirituality this piece is very much based on Congo bottle trees as I mentioned in connection with a loss of innocence these are trees that were originally made in the Congo in Africa people hung bottles from them to reflect the sunlight and to ward off evil spirits and that tradition came over with slaves to the southern United States and even today if you travel in the rural South you might see a bottle tree in someone's front yard the wood pieces to which the bottles are attached are actually grape vine roots so they have a very gnarled almost bone like human quality to them if you look at the underside of the tabletop so to speak there is another black power fist in there there are palm fronds there's some kind of a shell there is actually facing upwards almost at the very bottom of this stack of elements another compass again this notion of a moral compass that our spirituality can serve as as a moral compass for all of us the sketches for this work originally stipulated that the piece would have blue bottles but in the final work we see they have become yellow amber bottles this piece sar thinks of as an altar almost looks like a chair but she thinks of it as an altar but again she said she didn't want to call it an altar piece because she felt that that would make people think of it in traditional religious terms and she thinks of it more broadly we see in this call and response between objects sketch and finished object the through lines of gender race and spirituality that she has addressed throughout her career and that she continues to address as she makes work today [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Views: 5,191

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: lacma, los angeles, art, museum, betye saar, african american artists, african american women, assemblage, artist sketchbooks, los angeles artists, LA artists

Id: IZd9PQpQx3Y

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Sun May 24 2020