Resist/Persist: The resonance of material in the collages of Deborah Krall
Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park (November 20, 2022-January 23, 2023)
Johanna Drucker, Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA
The collages in Deborah Krall’s recent exhibit have a wonderful material resonance to them. This is a combined effect of the character of “stuff” from which they are made and the overall aesthetic organization to which they are put. A strong formal symmetry governs the design of these works, which are made from a wide variety of accumulated materials and small objects. Chief among these are the many buttons saved from political campaigns and protests, their shiny laminated surfaces speaking across decades of activist moments in the history of public discourse. The pins support the double theme of “Resist/Persist” that provides the rubric for this group of works, and their use as formal elements raises interesting questions about the many ways that decontextualized objects continue to resonate over time.
These collage works are materially rich and formally compelling, so they provoke both close and distant engagement. As the artist herself says, this invites the viewer to “work a little to unpack the meaning” of the pieces, which, at first glance, can be understood as mandala-like objects. Krall is a mature, sophisticated visual artist, and so the fundamentals of color, structure, composition and form are all faultless, exhibiting the confidence of an individual skilled from long experience and with a highly-trained eye. But the hand plays its part here as well, with the deft capacity to assemble disparate materials into a fully organized vivid and colorful whole while the parts are at once called to attention and subsumed in the larger piece.
But what makes these works so engaging is precisely that back and forth between the overall compositions and the materials from which they are made. Beads, buttons, fake paste ornaments, a tiny playing piece from a board game, a whole sprinkling of miniature human beings cast in pale, salmon-pink latex, a mass of straight pins arranged with the careful massing of magnetized filings, or individually glued in a circular array, their attenuated forms just visible enough to track light in a line along their surfaces. The materials are not the terms of a rebus, not symbolic units of a visual phrase, but their associations do come actively into play. For instance, black lace stretched over pink paint on the corners of one piece inevitably says “naughty negligee.” This takes us back to the work of feminist artists in the 1970s and 80s who subverted the presumed neutrality of minimalist art by making its formally reduced objects from culturally suggestive materials. (Hannah Wilke, Lynda Benglis, Miriam Shapiro, Faith Ringgold, Rachel Lachowicz and many others).
Coming close to Krall’s collages is like entering a drawer of accumulated memory, the detritus of lived experience held and repurposed for a new life. A crocheted coat button pressed into a bottle cap, its tight black weave of thread neatly framed by the crimped edge of metal, assumes the stance of a royal memento. Though modest, it is composed of things that each are the outcome of long and complex processes of industrial and craft production. They evidence our capacity as a species to transform the raw materials of the world into an endless variety of cast, extruded, molded and elaborated things that pass as utterly inconspicuous in our daily lives, so cluttered with the stuff of material consumption. The careful arrangement of each material artifact subsumes the hoard of materials into new roles but without erasing their identity. Looking closely at a patterned surface texture I can begin to see the bits of plastic tubing, collections of googley-eyes, and other generally discarded and disregarded leftovers.
But the heart of this work resides in the political pins, their messages also formally indexed to various moments of their production. Bold red and blue political buttons seem of an early era while the photographic imagery of more recent protest movements, printed and wrapped around the metal disks, backed with harsh straight pins, comes closer to the present. The ease of reproduction, cheap print, available means of production have all shifted the ability to produce activist materials into readily accessed lifecycle. Once these objects depended on the graphical skills of trained designers donating their work to a cause. A button like “Bring Troops Home Now” was clearly professionally executed. But desktop computers, cheap printers, and inexpensive button-making machines have put production into the hands of multiple communities and individuals. Voices clamor from these surfaces, they are the “persistent” element of the “resistance” that Krall’s exhibit brings into view. Many of the protest buttons were hers, kept for years as a record of her own activist engagement, but others were given to her from the drawers and boxes of other friends whose own long commitment is embodied in these small archival records of struggle across time.
The buttons are both removed from their times and speak of and from their moments. Some statements are highly specific—such as “U.S. Out of El Salvador” on vintage buttons from the 1980s. Others remain all too pertinent and relevant in the face of recent shifts in the political climate in the United States. Women’s rights, prisoner’s rights, and the Black Lives Matter movement are all part of ongoing struggles that persist. The embodiment of historical conflicts in material artifacts is richly present in these works, and without turning any of the materials into fetish items or precious things, Krall preserves their integrity and capacity to be read as documents of our collective experience. Protest buttons speak in a mode of direct address, they are neither subtle nor oblique, and yet as the context within which they exist disappears, their messages sometimes have to be recovered. Which troops were to be brought home from which conflict? When did the phrase “every child left behind” rhyme with its official, hypocritical opposite, “no child left behind” in such a way that it was immediately recognizable? Which moment of ongoing struggle is marked in these undated statements about abortion, women’s rights, racial bias, or gay rights?
The strength of formal symmetry in Krall’s collages is in productive dialogue with the ever-so-slight but variations in the arrangement of gems or cut-outs, of bits and pieces of this or that. The near-perfection of the works is not mechanical, but visceral, hand-made, and thus shows their craft as part of their activist aesthetic. Carefully made, they restructure and re-present the material evidence of political work in the enduring commitment to struggle. A personal and private vision, but situated within the public space of protest and history, Krall’s collages are a rich record of commitment to both activism and art and of the intersection of the two in her practice.
Krall has been part of the Arroya Arts collective for years, a community that has provided its own ongoing context of dialogue and support. The independent gallery in which “Persist/Resist” is installed, Avenue 50 Studio, has its own a significant history under the leadership of Kathy Gallegos. The other exhibits in the space(s) of the gallery showcase a range of projects and works, many created in participation with under-represented communities. If the phrases “community based” and “grass roots” have any remaining meaning in the demographically-opportunistic trends of the contemporary art world, it is because of such persistent support for the vital and varied activity of artmaking.