Collage and Assemblage in the Microbial World

“T are two problems in painting” said American artist Frank Stella (b. 1936) when he was still a brash young man. “One is to fi nd out what painting is, and the other is to fi nd out how to make a painting” (1). Stella’s interest in the defi nition of painting may have refl ected late 19thearly 20th-century modernist concerns. More contemporary concerns focus primarily on how to make a painting, how to use materials, methods, concepts, or traditions to create a work that may not even be called a painting. How a work is determines what it is (2). Atlanta artist Eric Mack, a man of his times, is part of the contemporary scene and its pressures to create a painting. At one time, art was organized by schools, later by movements. Today, these designations are diffi cult to apply. Painting cannot be categorized exclusively as a certain palette or style, and no consistent look or theme can be used to quantify its sum. The old labels (abstract, realist, symbolist, surrealist, expressionist, narrative) may still describe some works. But others defy all convention. They have no images, no drawing, no color, no canvas, or are not made by the artist’s hand. “I’m all about shape, pattern, and repetition of form,” is how Mack describes his own work (3). Among his techniques, collage and assemblage are suited for discovering new forms and forming new ways to connect objects retrieved from the world. His canvases contain synthetic netting, natural fi bers, leaves, Japanese text, board game graphics, corporate logos, small levers and sockets, plugs, dials and switches. These bits and pieces of objects, punctuated by a painted eyeball here, a peacock feather there, are laboriously integrated into a fl uid backdrop of color applied by brush or aerosol. The effect refers to recent traditions, among them abstract expressionism, pop, and graffi ti (4). “She got me those clippers and told me that once I learned to cut hair,” Mack says of his mother, a cosmetologist, “I would never have to worry about going hungry.” His career as barber fl ourished throughout his years at the Atlanta College of Art, when he was co-owner of “Barber’s Edge” on Buford Highway, the city’s bustling multiethnic corridor where he tended all styles and customers: “Flat-