From The Studio: Ossorio's Way

The Parrish Museum's "Alfonso Ossorio: Congregations 1959-1969," a series of 25 wall-hung panels encrusted with natural objects of all kinds, is a lavish, spellbinding exhibit of the anti-traditional art of one of the most remarkable artists of our time. It is the first museum exposure of this phase of the artist's work, and the most comprehensive anywhere.

A compilation of sophisticated collages, it is above all a stunning adaptation of the folk arts of embedment and encrustation, in which objects are attached, usually by gluing, to glass bottles, wooden boards, or ceramic jars, in random juxtapositions that suggest new meanings, associations, and ways of seeing.

The show extends the history of collage and assemblage, although Ossorio's way was to disassociate with academic disciplines. He originated new forms and techniques that came directly out of the unconscious, out of a profound not-knowing.

Extensive Vocabulary

He began painting with embedded objects in 1958. His first works, which were shown in an exhibit at the Betty Parsons Gallery, used sand, gravel, and seashells.

Later his vocabulary of materials grew to include mosaic, glass, ceramic dishes and shards, china and porcelain, tortoise and the whole range of seashells, plastic, beads, buttons, costume jewelry, mirror fragments, dice, coins, nails, bolts, screws, bones, eyeballs from taxidermy shops, antlers and horns of all kinds, teeth, handcuffs, chains, driftwood, photographs, glass eyes, doorknobs, skulls, bones, hat and shoe lasts, plastic toys, wheels, nails, and more.

For Ossorio, common things held the gift of surprise. He could look at a safety pin or a toothpick as if he had never seen it before and it was devoid of functional associations - a miracle of object-ness, potent with transformation into new and amazing apparitions.

Beautiful And Banal

Within a year, paint had become no more than a ground in which to embed his superabundance of found objects, for which he hunted and haunted junk shops, garbage dumps, flea markets, and hardware stores.

By 1969, Ossorio was working fast and furiously to make his bizarre and extreme statements of the act of making, just as Jackson Pollock did using paint. Ossorio was far less affected than many of his contemporaries by de Kooning and the other painters of the New York School, whose work, despite their innovations in Abstract Expressionism, was still resonant with the art of the past.

Many works were of major size, such as "Palindrome," some 8 by 6 feet, in which the conglomeration of objects, mounted on a wall panel, become a religious relic, a ritual icon, a piece of folk art - and kindred, as well, to commercial souvenir art such as a Statue of Liberty souvenir. A reliquary for both the beautiful and the banal.

Trusting Impulse

Ossorio chose his objects spontaneously as he pushed and placed them together, not knowing how it would be until the end, truly making it up as he went along.

Trusting chance, random choice, impulse, and blind instinct, he worked, like Pollock, totally in the present, his inexplicable combinations calling forth new expectations, ancient fears, and buried memories. Startling, garish with raw color, blatant, primitive, fetishistic, vibrating with worship and mystery, the aggregation of forms is often disquieting to viewers.

Ossorio himself, who was highly religious and ritualistic, considered them spiritual and spiritualized.

Artistic Influences

Born Alfonso Angel Ossorio y Yangco in 1916 in Manila to a large family of wealth and power, the future artist was sent to some of the best schools in the United States, including Harvard and the Rhode Island School of Design.

The depth of his intellect - he had an astonishingly broad knowledge of philosophy, theology, literature, and psychology - as well as his command of anatomy and physiology (acquired as a medical illustrator in the United States Army during World War II), was to manifest itself throughout his oeuvre as a refined and rich intuitive force informing his search for the primitive.

He was already deeply involved in his experiments, including the multiple imagery that is his signature, when, after his discharge from the Army in the mid '40s, he met Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Jean Dubuffet, and Clyfford Still in New York City. All of them profoundly influenced him, and he began to collect their work. He was, in fact, one of Pollock's first collectors.

Outsider Art

By the late '40s, Ossorio had firmly rejected the academy and its traditions and begun exploring oil painting, at the same time developing his new techniques of wax resist, ink, and watercolor.

From Dubuffet, he learned about art brut, the art of the insane, and outsider art, the art of people isolated from the culture, uncorrupted by schools, status, money, and power, where the will to art reveals itself as a pure drive out of the unconscious. Later, his collection embraced not only the finest of the avant-garde painters but also outsider art: hobo matchstick constructions and the most ordinary of everyday things made by anonymous folk.

In 1948, Ossorio followed Jackson and Lee to the East End, and soon after bought the Creeks, the East Hampton estate on Georgica Pond where he was to live for over 40 years. He turned it into a magnificent mansion with a renowned arboretum and a legendary collection of objects from many cultures, marking everything he touched with his connoisseurship and lifestyle.

Late Recognition

But his wealth, which gave him the independence to pursue his work as well as the ability to buy the paintings and sculpture of the artists he admired, also worked to his disadvantage.

Although he exhibited with the Betty Parsons Gallery and others, recognition by the New York establishment for the major artist that he is began to arrive only shortly before his death in 1990.

His role as a leading member of the East End Abstract Expressionists in the '50s was celebrated by Guild Hall in 1992 in a memorable exhibit on the artists of the Signa Gallery, founded in 1957 by three artists: Ossorio, John Little, and Elizabeth Parker.

Pure Authenticity

From the beginning, all his works - wood engravings, drawings, oils, etchings, monotypes, sculptural assemblages, to his last vivid, moving "Recovery" series, hasty ink drawings done in the hospital during the final weeks of his life - record the artist's self-imposed struggle for pure authenticity, uncompromised by social forces and institutions of learning.

Unremittingly, he pursued an art that comes from the deepest, truest, most complex and savage self, from a voracious, all-consuming unconscious.

The drawings and paintings that follow "Congregations" keep the spirit of multitude, with the entangling line becoming faces, mouths, phalluses, embryos, breasts. There are drawings crowded with dense, agitated sperm and amoeba-like floating forms, eyes, and signs of the zodiac, all becoming each other with double meanings and no meanings, puns and accidents taking place in the graffiti of a fugitive dream.

A New Art

In trusting the ordinary to become extraordinary without the accoutrements of academic fine art, Alfonso Ossorio made a new art, as outrageous as it was original.

For the success of the Parrish Museum show we have the guest curator Klaus Kertess to thank, in conjunction with the courageous director of the museum, Trudy Kramer, whose conviction of the unique importance of Ossorio's work transcended the reluctance of other institutions in this country to take and travel the exhibit.

The Parrish's presentation is a brilliant and valuable one-time event. The exhibit will remain on view until Sept. 28.

At the Ossorio Foundation in Southampton, 164 Mariner Drive, a continuing 50-year survey of the artist's work may be seen by appointment.