Betye Saar's intense, miniaturized images, collaged and boxed, are drawn from the vocabulary of the unconscious; they stem from her preoccupation with occult and mystical worlds, the rituals of the palmist and astrologer, fetishism, voodoo, psychic phenomena and the obsessive, repetitive motifs of Africa and the Orient.
Her earlier pieces were directly political, incorporating satirical, violent, derogatory images of blacks — Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Little Black Sambo—produced by a white society. Divorced from things mystical, the iconography of dancing darkies, watermelons and cotton balls was transformed by rifles and black-power symbols into bolder statements of anger and frustration. Less intimate than the newer work, these pieces were a direct response to her conviction that ‘ethnic minorities themselves just don’t get precious.”
In the early 1970s, politics became subsumed by Saar’s desire to explore the roots and residues of black folk culture; growing up in Los Angeles, she was impressed by Rodia's Watts Towers, close to where her grandmother lived: the towers had, she says, ‘mother wit,"’ a special kind of intuition.
As a child she avidly collected ‘‘things.”’ For her, finding something discarded or ugly and re- cycling it into something else is another kind of mother wit. Such recycled objects constitute the Folk Altars she has made for many years; these contain black dolls, skulls, eyes, hearts, shells, feathers, pieces of wood, mirrors, scraps of leather, candles. The altars are larger sculptural works, powerful, frontal and iconic, but the relationship of the viewer to the works affords a sense of exclusion or isolation, partly because of their size and partly because they are obviously places of worship.
The pieces of the past three years in this exhibition explore the symbols, mysteries and rituals of many cultures; the iconography is universal despite its hermeticism—astrological signs, the Eye of God, sky, earth and subterranean creatures, the realm of death. Still other boxes she has made are like reliquaries, containing pictures and scraps of letters, lace and butterflies, objects black and white, which at once evoke Saar’s childhood and encapsulate the gently ironic side of a collective racial memory.
The tiny overall size of Saar’s pieces and the extreme miniaturization of their components are reminiscent of Joseph Cornell's work, which she has always loved; nevertheless, her evocations are specifically related to the culture in which she was raised and to the spiritual and occult concerns which are, for her, an outgrowth of that culture. The pieces themselves, paradoxically, because they are miniature, afford an immense view of the universe by allowing the viewer to enter them visually and psychologically; they must be occupied slowly, however, because there is so much in so small a space. Miniature invites fantasy and reverie; Gaston Bachelard remarked that insofar as the world can be miniaturized, it can be possessed. Betye Saar’s work makes available to us an intangible world of delicate, mysterious images, exotic and magical, nurtured by dreams and consumed by the imagination.
Marcia Tucker
Curator