CINDY RICHMOND
preservation/ creation/ metamorphosis
Aesthetically, his use of whatever materials come to hand recalls the 'ready made' of Marcel Duchamp, but also the Art Brut willingness to experiment with different materials, and the irreverent attitudes of the California Funk Art movement towards the more rarefied traditions of fine art. Severson's penchant for preserving things (which he claims to have got from his grandfather), has become an integral part of his creative process. The objects he saves from the rubbish bin become the framework, or the limiting condition, of his artistic expression. Each piece of detritus: the matchbook, the Melita label, the torn piece of paper, become an active ingredient in a new piece of art. It is in this sense then that for Severson preservation is linked to creation; and the activity of recycling the objects our culture arbitrarily defines as waste, can become a kind of metamorphosis.
The works in this exhibition are predominantly drawings on recycled materials, or drawings with recycled materials collaged onto them. A number of the works also include handwritten text, which Severson describes as 'automatic writing.' His use of this unusual combination of materials, media, and forms of expression, and the almost obsessively detailed character of the drawings has a complex history. Perhaps the most important early influence on Severson's art was the California Funk artist William Wiley. Wiley came to teach at Emma Lake in 1973, and brought with him the Funk Art movement's commitment to the use of diverse materials, and to combining various media together in the activity of art-making. Wiley was also a superb cartoonist and draughts man, who believed with Warhol and others that popular forms of drawing such as cartoons, could inspire interesting and important art just as well as the drawings of the old masters. Severson was particularly influenced by Wiley's willingness to take chances with each piece of work, and his refusal to be bound to any one theoretical position or conception of what art should be about. As a result of his contact with Wiley, he b began to concentrate on drawing and draughtsmanship as his primary form of expression. The overall attention to detail in Severson's drawings, and the use of notation or text, recalls Wiley's interest in cartoons and is inspired in a larger sense by the view that we are too narrow in our views of what can count as art.
A second important influence on the development of Jack Severson's art were the later drawings and studies of the Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti. The impulsive and intense nervous energy of Giacometti's drawings have an obsessive character that appeals to Severson, and we find traces of them in works like Untitled (Ducks Snoozing. . .), May, 1981 or Ecological Barn,June 21, 1982 (see fig. 1, cat. no. 39). Giacometti's drawings on torn-out pages of books or magazines (for instance his pen sketches of Henri Matisse on a cover of Les Temps Modernnes, 1954), also coincided with Severson's method of using recycled paper to make drawings. The point being that this unusual combination of media: used paper, text that pertains in another context, and the drawn figure, appealed in the first instance to Severson's aesthetic interests.
In Wiley and Giacometti then, Severson found artists who were skilled draughts man, but who were not at the same time slaves to their technique. Their willingness to go beyond the ideal of representation, to take chances each time they set pen or pencil to paper, was tremendously inf influential in forming his approach to making art. Severson attempts to combine the formal skills of draughtsmanship with an intuitive approach to his subject and his media. His work is in this sense anti-intellectual, or to be more precise, anti-conceptual. But in saying this I am not suggesting that he reflects less upon his art than other, so-called 'conceptual artists.' The point is rather that he does not think art should be just a matter of executing predetermined ideas in paint or metal or any other media. Indeed, he regards adherence to any one theoretical or conceptual framework as the equivalent of an artistic straitjacket. In Severson's view the attempt to impose a predetermined idea upon a work of art, or to use one's technique solely to execute such an idea, restricts the artist's ability to respond directly and originally to the integrity of that individual work.
It might be said then that the principle guiding Jack Severson's art is his willingness to follow his intuition; his openness to risk and even the possibility of failure is integral to the work. The drawings and collages here have no obvious narrative order, nor do they suggest any architectonic plan. They are on the contrary almost obsessively detailed; and while some of the details are obviously connected, the presence of others seems to defy rational explanation. They are in a sense like 'doodles,' and here the connection with and use of 'automatic writing' in some of these works is significant. They might for instance begin with a feeling or an idea of which the artist is not fully conscious, and then progress not as an execution of that feeling or idea, but rather as a series of intuitive responses to the various elements of the work suggested by it. Both the images we find in these works and their strange combinations of elements, including their texts, follow this intuitive trajectory. As an artist Severson attempts to engage each of his works individually, drawing and combining media together so as to respect as far as he is able their unique integrity and character.
Although Jack Severson's interest in and use of recycled materials arose originally from his aesthetic preoccupations, it also has significance beyond his strictly artistic concerns. The process of recycling urban detritus is consistent with his way of life, which manifests a very deep concern for our shared environment. His desire to preserve things comes partly from a deep-seated skepticism about the values of a society that produces unimaginable amounts of"waste" each day. Consider for instance the work, Skull with Crossbones, May 24, 25, 1985 
, in which a tomato tin label becomes the ground for a ghostly death mask, which is in turn superimposed on Monopoly money. The recycled materials in this work are connected with Severson's moral indignation, and i indeed dismay, at the indifference our consumer-oriented society shows to wards the natural environment. In this respect Severson sees himself as a kind of "archaeologist of the present," someone who is concerned to uncover the character of humankind's relations with its environment from the mass of material objects and ideological positions mediating that relationship. Hence we find, in works like Ecological Barn and Peace able Kingdom, January 1, 1982 (cat. no. 37), visions of an idyllic harmony between humans and their natural environment; while works like Bleak Scape, November 9, 1985 , and Slippery When Wet, September, 1981 (cat. no. 17), reveal the darker reality of this relationship, and in so doing enjoin us to do something about it.
None of this is to suggest that Severson is concerned to preach at us about our indifference to the destruction of our environment. He does not make art to express his concern over this, it is rather that this concern, like his art, is an integral part of his lived experience, of his everyday life. He preserves things because he thinks this is part of what we must do as responsible human beings, and he uses these things in his art because they feed his creative imagination. There is then an internal consistency to Severson's aesthetic and environmentalist concerns. His art is the fruit of a fertile union, and it bears eloquent witness to our profoundly ambiguous domination of nature.