Love and rubbish - George Herms, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, California

Art in America, April, 1993 by Ken Johnson

A retrospective at L.A.'s Municipal Art Gallery surveyed the 30-year career of George Herms, a California assemblagist determined to release the esthetic possibilities of neglected materials.

Around the time that Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, Richard Stankiewicz and others began making art out of trash in New York, a parallel movement emerged on the West Coast that came to be known as California Assemblage. Like their East Coast counterparts, the California artists built deliberately grungy works out of urban detritus, junkyard finds, things discovered in attics, basements and secondhand stores. But in contrast to the New Yorkers, whose works came out of Cubism or Constructivism and tended to revolve around formal concerns, the Californians made works that had roots in Surrealism and Symbolism and were more concerned with psychological or social meanings.

The four artists most famously associated with California Assemblage are Wallace Berman, Ed Kienholz, Bruce Conner and George Herms. Herms, who was the subject last fall of a retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, may be the most difficult of the four to call to mind. Each of the others developed a certain readily recognizable signature style--Berman is known for mystically suggestive photocollages featuring esoteric images; Kienholz for his hyperdramatic narrative tableaus, artfully crafted at life size; and Conner for his haunting, weirdly humorous sculptures and reliefs evoking Gothic states of decay, horror and enchantment.

Herms has always been a junk sculptor but he has tended not to create the kinds of strong images that the other three have. There's less sense of the materials being shaped toward particular esthetic ends. Rather, Herms tends to let the found components of his works be themselves; often things look as though they came together by chance. There's a relaxed, improvisational messiness about his oeuvre (jazz has been an important source of inspiration); what holds it all together is less style than a belief in the ability of art to release the hidden metaphorical and esthetic soul of its materials--even rubbish.

Herms was born in Woodland, Calif., in 1935. He studied engineering in college briefly but had no formal training in art. When he was just 20 years old he became friends with Wallace Berman, who had begun making Surrealistic assemblages in the late 1940s. An underground legend among West Coast beatniks and, later, hippies, Berman seems to have been an extraordinarily charismatic man; his effect on Herms was profound and decisive. Recently, Herms told an interviewer:

The first show that I saw of [Berman's] was at Ferus Gallery, where he took an art gallery and turned it into a temple. "Art is Love is God." [The show was in 1957; the motto was printed on the exhibition announcement.] That's when I decided that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life--I want to take whatever life puts in front of me and put into a space and turn that space into a temple. Those were the original goals in the fifties, goals which I'm still working on today....[1]

Judging by the Municipal Art Gallery show, which offered some works dating from as early as 1960 but mostly work from the past six or seven years, Herms has indeed stayed faithful to the premises with which he began. Within the found-object mode he has experimented restlessly; his works have ranged from small Cornell-style boxes to environmental-scale public installations. But rather than develop in any discernibly linear way, he seems to have been moving back and forth over the same territory for three decades. (At any rate, if there has been sequential "progress" in Herms's art, it was not apparent in the exhibition, the installation of which was not chronological.) Nor has there been any change in his philosophical purpose: the ambition to make art a mode of spiritual practice and experience still centrally animates his enterprise.

One of the works included in the show that tells a great deal about Herms as an artist is Secret Archives, which was made in 1974 near the midpoint of his career and which furnished the title for the whole exhibition. A kind of oversized Cornell box, the piece consists of a rough wooden crate measuring about 4 by 5 feet, which is divided into 21 rectangular cubbyholes. The box is supported at each end by a wooden kitchen chair. Each of the compartments contains one or several objects: an unraveled metal tape measure, a small sculptural reproduction of an ancient Egyptian head, an antique camera, a toaster, a couple of empty peanut cans, an old toy top, a broken globe, an empty Miracle Whip jar, a collection of National Geographic magazines and a lot of other things that give the whole a cluttered and aleatory look.

The piece gives a pleasing general impression. An unruly collection is composed into an orderly grid; a somber palette of browns, blacks and grays is punctuated here and there by touches of bright yellow, red and blue. There's also something evocative--nostalgic and pathetic, even--about all these things that time has robbed of whatever value they once had. The whole piece looks as if it might have been found as is, perhaps in the neglected basement of a reclusive old man.