The Fence: an artist’s statement

by Richard Dennner

The process begins with a contemplative walk down Willowside Road to Santa Rosa Creek. Along the way, an odd piece of junk appeara, detritus which gives off an aura. I don’t think much about the particular piece, except to pocket the item. When I return home, I add the piece to a box that contains other found objects. Then, when the time is right, I begin to build another combine, which I will add to a fence in my back yard.

I make compositions, moving the objects here and there, until they fall into place. I like there to be a fit, and I try to interlock the shapes of the objects to give structure to the piece—an architecture of randomness—keeping nails, glue, wire, staples, screws, welding to a minimum. I bring desperate objects together—eggshell Styrofoam, curtain lace, blurry photos, wood and plastic water pipe—hoping for a fortunate accident of composition. Looking for nothing behind the junk.

There are examples of combining found objects and of pasting together paper images in the folk art of the 19th century, as well some mixed media in the early work of Picasso. However, it is Kurt Schwitters, a German artist of the 1920s who is considered the father of collage. He created what are known as Mertz, after finding a scrap of newspaper and deducing the fragment came from the word commertz. He worked this scrap into his collage. The idea that this lowly fragment of commerce could be recycled into the economy intrigued him. That which is rejected, ignored, cast aside, is still a part of the system, and the artist threads it back into the fabric of society. This art was considered decadent and meaningless by the Third Reich, so Schwitters’s work was burned, and he fled to America.

I am not a trained artist. I took printmaking and a class in drawing from Terrance Choy at the University of Alaska in the early 1970s. Mainly, I have hung out with artists who eat, drink and dream art, and I’ve watched them work and sat in cafes and walked the streets, talking with them. I go to museums and galleries and look at the pictures. It was 1959, and I was 18, when I went to my first art show at the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art and saw Robert Motherwell’s blue collages of Gualois cigarette wrappers mixed with paint. Later, I saw an exhibit of Brancusi and Giocometti sculptures and a retrospective of Kandinsky paintings. All of these exhibits strongly affected me—the tearingness of collage in the work of Motherwell, the solid presence of the Brancusis, the organic economy of the Giocomettis, the ethereal precision of the Kandinskys. Later, other famous and not so famous artists would have affect on me. Luis Garcia’s collages, for example, revealed to me that materials are everywhere, and I still strive for the sense of alignment I feel in his work.

I have used the skills of a carpenter, a plumber, a printer, a painter—trades I work at and enjoy—to make my combines. The best carpenter is the one who can hide his errors. However, here I like to see the errors, the crustiness, the broken, bent, wrinkled, burnt, twisted materials, the wire, thread, nails, and the seams in the cut paper. I paint with junk, exploring space, positioning this so-called trash to reveal its overlooked beauty, as well as to make a good fence.