Betye Saar’s wide-ranging multimedia practice has been united for decades under a sustained in
Betye Saar’s wide-ranging multimedia practice has been united for decades under a sustained interest in mysticism. “I am intrigued with combining the remnants of memories, fragments of relics and ordinary objects, with the components of technology,” Saar says. “It’s a way of delving into the past and reaching into the future simultaneously. The art itself becomes the bridge.” In Saar’s practice, this engagement with mystical motifs becomes vehicle by which diverse faiths and cultures—West African, South Asian, Native American—can coalesce and harmonize, mapped onto bodies and objects and revealing the complexity of identity and lived experience. It’s also a means for subtle, artful critique. Here, Saar references the practice of phrenology, the 19th-century pseudoscience that emerged as a means of supposedly proving racial difference and inferiority through the study of physiognomy. Instead of a detailed medical chart, however, Saar shows us a brain full of symbols—moons, stars, planets, patterns—that invoke an alternate non-western understanding of consciousness and the order of man and nature. The figure on the left, its viscera rendered in a washy red abstraction, gazes out of its frame and toward the moon and sun, suggesting a vision of truth and the self that is not individualist but rather external and universal. “Curiosity about the unknown has no boundaries,” Saar has written. “Symbols, images, place and cultures merge. Time slips away. The stars, the cards, the mystic vigil may hold the answers. By shifting the point of view an inner spirit is released. Free to create.”Betye Saar, The Phrenologer’s Window II, 1966 -- source link
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