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PRESS
JAZZ, ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, AND NOW,
ASSEMBLAGE - THREE AMERICAN ARTFORMS
Beaudelaire's Triangle: Poetry, Art and Music. All have infinite variety.
The broad horizon, the great unknown, the journey of the individual. Each a unique path.
The story of Clifford Brown, trumpet player, about to go on in a concert, asked what he would play. "The Man I Love," answered Clifford. "Oh, you can't - Milt Jackson just played 'The Man I Love.'" "Well," said Clifford, "that was Milt Jackson playing 'The Man I Love'".
And so we come to the assemblage works of Diana Levitt.
What has come to her hands to be placed according to her eye in these three dimensional diary pages. With a background in theatre and painting, she brings to assemblage the results of avant garde explorations in those mediums. She is a true child of the 20th Century where the proscenium arch in theatre and picture plane in painting were both attacked with revolutionary zeal.
The objects become characters in a play. The set design is a collage of painterly mystery.
Issues of recognition and previous incarnations drift around the edges. As William Seitz said in his definitive essay, "The components of assemblage works are ASSOCIATIONALLY ALIVE." *
To take these objects beyond their history and present them not as a list or inventory, but to create a new poem, that is the challenge Diana Levitt has chosen.
In the end, the success of her endeavors lies in the eye of the beholder. The aura and aroma is always - these are labors of love.
George Herms, July 2003
*THE ART OF ASSEMBLAGE.
William Seitz, Museum of Modern Art -- 1961
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