Personal Reflections, by Arthur Secunda
I first took a night course in welding at the Los Angeles Trade
Technical School in the early 60s. I had done some minor sculpture
in conventional materials such as clay and wood back in Paris and
also in Mexico, but now I yearned to find expression in some new
contemporary material that embodied my times and experiences.
Besides, I adored and admired the sculpture of David Smith and
Stankiewitz, and knew that there was some place for me in between
the new, shiny, organic constructivism of Smith and the crusty,
sophisticated, incivility of Stankiewitz. All of the other students
took the course in order to get jobs repairing automobile mufflers,
a skill I quickly picked up and abandoned in favor of joining
together anything that looked unjoinable.
But it wasn't till some time later that I met a serious sculptor
named Melvin Edwards who was truly a master welder. It was Mel who
helped me see metal as a malleable living material with potential
far beyond just "sticking things together" permanently. This, in
turn, opened my eyes to using other materials organically, even
wood scraps - in the way I saw assemblage artists such as Charles
Frazier, Edward Keinholz and John Bernhardt putting unexpected
materials in totally unlikely contexts. Soon I was gluing ends,
cut-offs and lumberyard scraps together in three-dimensional forms
that often turned out looking figurative in a stylized and satiric
way. Without doubt I was also influenced by Simon Rodia (who built
the Watts Towers), through my friendship with the activists Kate
Steinitz, Louise Krasne and Professor Paul Laporte.
It was in late 1965, soon after the Watts Riots that I was
exhibiting at the Konstsalongen Kavaletten in Uppsala - my first of
many shows in Sweden - that I juxtaposed a number of Watts Series
collages with thematically appropriate three-dimensional welded,
glued and constructed pieces. I'm not sure if The King was
one of them or if I just happened to have a photograph of it from
my Ankrum Gallery (Los Angeles) show. In any case, I had befriended
a silkscreen printer, Jonas Engquist, in nearby Gavle and we spent
a good deal of time "playing" with the assemblage imagery,
photographically transferring fragments of pieces to a screen,
reversing, editing and literally re-making the images into subject
matter with double meanings in a spontaneous act of pure play - in
the most creative sense of that over-used expression. Having
numerous proof prints around on which to improvise, I took a
matte-printed gold proof of The King and boldly painted out
the King's contours and crudely blocked in the basic form of a head
and shoulders. I was left with a portrait of an aggressive
robot-victim, disheveled and stiff, caught unexpectedly in a
frenzied state of animated impotence. At the same time, because the
paint I used was not completely opaque, semblances of the King's
crown and sceptre came through as a sort of shadow behind a
curtain, adding a regal touch of sarcasm and humor to an otherwise
proud yet pathetic persona. I understood immediately that I had
captured a personal icon that somehow expressed Everyman's dilemma
of being seemingly omnipotent but trapped. The Anarchist was
born and lived.
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