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Soaring Saar

The complex assemblages of Betye Saar make exquisite connections between the personal and the universal

By Ann Elliott Sherman

Betye Saar's Personal Icons, now on display at the de Saisset Museum, are not simply beautiful. They are uncommonly intricate, integrated assemblages in which each object, each material contributes to an elegant fusion of design, texture and color that finds the connections between disparate things. They are a far cry from the funky, anything-goes aesthetic usually associated with other California artists working in the genre.

Long known for her shadow boxes that examine the African American experience and subvert racial and gender stereotypes, Saar, who is African American, turns inward in Personal Icons, forging cultural links more subtly.

In Return of the Spirits, a recent work featuring the geometric symmetry and somewhat clayey palette of Tantric art, tiny metal busts of an American Indian, of Nefertiti and of an African tribeswoman provide ancestral referents from the African diaspora. Fine details--the reappearance of the quadriform flower motif carved into one surface in the pattern of a collaged paper strip, the echo of the window frame's wood-grained finish in another border of printed paper--produce a sensation of time's vastness collapsing into a single moment.

Pragmatic viewers might just marvel at how Saar manages to find all the coordinating pieces, while others could extrapolate the experience into a cosmic epiphany. Either way, the exquisite synthesis of these works is pretty mind-boggling. (I feel compelled to note that even a staunch atheist waxed enthusiastic when he saw the color photographs in the exhibition catalog.)

Saar's shadow boxes might be filled with what's commonly referred to as "found objects," but her use of them lends the air of fated necessity to what begins as happenstance. It's almost as if inanimate odds and ends find their way to Saar, who unlocks the resonant associations within them while giving expression to her chosen aesthetic or metaphysical themes.

For example, the shrinelike Prophecy incorporates an African elephant-hair bracelet worn by a child who drowned, given away by the girl's mother seeking release from her burden of grief. The bracelet was passed on to Saar, who uses it to encircle a milagro of a sword-pierced sacred heart in a composition dominated by somber black and shot with touches of silver gold--illumination woven out of darkness.

As she allows in her statement for the show, Saar's curiosity about the mystical is a constant thread running through several decades of her work. Icons from various religions and cultures, "power emblems," relics and keepsakes are freely combined in tightly coherent works.

No neoprimitive technophobe, Saar's embrace of memory- and power-laden icons even encompasses computer components, as in Lost Dimension of Time, where a circuit board is transformed into an Egyptian Deco palace of the gods.

Wiped with blue paint, framed by mustard-gold, brick-red, dull green and gray-blue rectangles (the shape symbolizes expanded knowledge in the Tantric tradition) and bordered above and below by sacred circles--a hand-tinted picture of a galaxy and the rusted screen from a faucet--The Messiah suddenly has a lot in common with Hindu divinities.

In less accomplished hands, these pieces could come off as some kind of New Age hodgepodge of borrowed spirituality tethered by the desire to attain a certain digital hipness quotient. But Saar's rigorous composition, her fluent translation of recognizable symbols and ordinary objects into a personal lexicon, and her attention to unifying detail and nuance avoid any semblance of casual tourism of world cultures, or of any overly self-conscious quest for Jungian archetypes. What we see are the results of a roving intellect, a sophisticated and discriminating eye, and an active intuition working toward soulful communion.

That citizen-of-the-world attitude is just one refreshing distinction between Saar and other assemblage artists who incorporate sacred charms and ritual objects into their work. Unconfined by any one tradition, Saar can explore the universal motivation to explain or order our existence reflected in these symbols. Freed of their expected context, the objects have a renewed vigor.

Yet the demanding level of her craftsmanship affords no disrespect. As if to acknowledge the idea that flying solo as a messenger for an unknown that transcends all bounds and cultural expectations is just another form of earthly struggle, the carrier dove in the piece titled Sojourn is shackled by a ball and chain, an upraised fist below it.

In the show's earlier works, Saar uses paint primarily as a unifying finish for found objects. The technique can be clearly seen in the extensive verdigris color wash "aging" the table, boxes and objects in Eternity's Witness.

But in the newer assemblages produced during the artist's residence in Italy at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, layered swatches of rich brocades and strips of printed papers have given way to painted rectangles and backgrounds framing altered Polaroid photographs. The snapshots--standard landscapes and architectural features that Saar has tinted or obscured by scratching into the emulsion--add depth to works that take the idea of "traveling light" literally.

These new pieces are awash in clear, transparent colors that suggest Mediterranean frescoes, with the number of added objects kept to a minimum. The Vision at the Villa series, each work distinguished by its dominant color, functions as a kind of atmospheric travelogue, and you can almost feel the freshening winds.

Personal Icons is being presented as part of Santa Clara University's ongoing, four-month series of events collectively known as Justice and the Arts: The Persistence of Hope. It serves as a welcome reminder that there is still room for a deeply personal search for the universal truths even in the midst of efforts to gain recognition for other defining aspects of one's human identity.

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Betye Saar: Personal Icons runs through March 17 at de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, Lafayette and Franklin streets, Santa Clara. (408/554-4528).

Everyone Can Be an Artist: A Children's Assemblage-making Workshop With Roderick and Jackie Sykes takes place Feb. 25, noon-4pm, at the museum. Call to reserve a space.


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