Betye Saar’s clocks are still ticking at 93

I’m in Love With the Sad One in the Corner

“Betye Saar: Call and Response” on view at LACMA

It’s evident that in the L.A. arts community Betye Saar is a living legend. Now 93 years old, Saar’s work is in the permanent collections of over 80 museums. She’s currently being honored through April 5 with “Betye Saar: Call and Response,” a condensed retrospective of recent work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which combines finished pieces with the preliminary illustrations (from her vast array of sketchbooks) that guided and developed her initial ideas.

In other words, this is a glimpse into her process of artmaking. As LACMA director Michael Govan puts it, “Known as an assemblage artist, Saar also sketches constantly, working out ideas triggered by found objects she unearths at flea markets, secondhand stores, and elsewhere.” The show itself, he adds, looks at “the relationship between Saar’s found objects, sketches, and finished works, shedding new light on her art.”

Saar’s use of found objects recalls the work of John Outterbridge and, to some extent, Ed Kienholz. She comes across a physical item and perhaps it suggests further forms and combinations. When a particular object “calls out” to her, Saar then looks through her assortment of other found objects to find pieces that resonate with it. As Carol Eliel writes in her essay, “The Mystery Touching the Beauty: Betye Saar and the Creative Process,” “She particularly likes objects that are somehow faded or weather-beaten and have acquired the patina of time.”

That’s probably true of most assemblage artists, including the ones I hold most dear, Rosamond Purcell and Ron Pippin.

With Saar’s work, the result doesn’t evoke the enigmatic, the mysterious or the vague, but falls into a category we can safely refer to as African-American folk art, which for the most part are comments or meditations on racial stereotypes and, looking back, the legacy of slavery and the plight of Africans shipped to the Americas.

As might be expected, much of the work is sobering (but with a wry smile or grin underlying it). Among the most arresting of these is “I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break” (1998), which replicates a diagram of the Brookes slave ship (an 1808 variation of a c.1787 image), a diagram that shows how 454 people were packed into the hold, and imprints it on an ironing board. A photo of a black woman ironing is reproduced at one end, and an actual iron is chained to the board. Furthermore, a white sheet hangs like a backdrop behind this altered household item with the letters KKK embroidered onto the hem of the sheet. What we can read into this is that the black woman’s troubles didn’t end after the abolition of slavery. It is also ironic in “that the woman who irons this sheet that the KKK person wears is a Black woman,” as Saar noted last year.

“Blowtop Blues: The Fire Next Time” (1998) seems to reference James Baldwin’s book of the same name. In this instance, a Black woman wearing a bandana that says LIBERATION (this being one of the many Aunt Jemimas who appear in Saar’s work) has flames shooting into the air above her head. She is, as the title suggests, blowing a fuse or blowing her top.

Saar gets more mileage out of Aunt Jemima in “Maid Rite – I’se in Town Honey” (1997), which incorporates an old washboard, as does “Supreme Quality” (1998), the latter assemblage piece notable for the guns that Aunt Jemima is cradling under both arms. Beneath her feet is inscribed the words “Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroines.”

One of my favorites is titled “The Weight of Buddha (Contemplating Mother Wit and Street Smarts)” (2014), and it’s largely a wry image in that the meditating black statuette of Buddha is holding in its lap an Aunt Jemima head wearing a bright red bandana. Furthermore, the Buddha is balanced on a scale with a Sambo face (looking like a cross between Batman and Felix the Cat, although I don’t believe that was the intent).

Another work worth noting is “Still Ticking” (2005), because it resides away from the African-American vibe and is more universal: Who can’t relate to getting older? This small bookcase is packed with old clocks, some of them without hands, that can be seen as an abstract self-portrait of the artist as she approached 80 years of age.

Additional pieces include birdcages with figures in them to evoke comparisons to captivity, but one certainly doesn’t need to be Black (or behind bars) to sometimes feel incarcerated. These works are certainly thought-provoking when they aren’t overworked.

“It is my goal as an artist,” Saar has said, “to create works that expose injustice and reveal beauty.”
What gives this show heft is the inclusion of the sketches, as already pointed out, which serves to prove that what might look spontaneous or improvised was actually mulled over, and perhaps at great length. And by having the sketches at hand we can, if rather vicariously, share in some of the thinking that went into the completed work.

The small catalogue for this exhibition cleverly mimics the notebooks themselves in that they are both spiral-bound.

This reviewer found the constructions variously effective, folksy creations that have little personal resonance. Be that as it may, others, of course, will find them poignant and moving.

The last paragraph of Carol Eliel’s catalogue essay neatly sums up Saar’s approach to artmaking: “‘I start with the found object and transform it,’ Saar has stated, ‘making it into something different, changing the idea of its use to an emotion or a feeling.’ Her sketchbooks are an integral part of this transformation; at the same time, they allow specific and intimate insights into Saar’s creative process, thus serving to illuminate and amplify her work.”

I need say nothing further.

Betye Saar: Call and Response is on view through April 5 in the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles. Concurrent exhibitions include Every Living Thing: Animals in Japanese Art (through Dec. 8) and Thomas Joshua Cooper: The World’s Edge (through Jan.26). Visit lacma.com or @lacma. ER

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