Baron Munchausen...Creative Thinker

Pop Quiz: Name the legendary character who did all of the following feats?:

1. Riding a Cannonball to Safety…which he was able to steer because of his excellent horsemanship.

2. Escaping Swamp…which seems like no great feat, unless you consider he did it by grabbing his own hair and pulling himself up.

3. Reaching Into Fierce Wolf’s Mouth….and reaching its tail then pulling it inside out.

4. Travelling to the Moon…by lassoing the point of the crescent and pulling himself up.

5. Being Swallowed by a Sea Monster…and escaping by using his boat’s masts to prop open the beast’s mouth.

TIMES UP! PENCILS DOWN

The Answer: Baron von Munchausen.

And who is Baron Munchausen? I’m glad you asked. He is a fictional adventurer, but actually based on a real individual with a mouthful of a name… Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen (1720–1797). He was a German nobleman who served as a cavalry officer in the Russian military with a fondness for storytelling embellishing his own experiences with extravagant and fantastical details.

Later, a writer named Rudolf Erich Raspe embellished these tales to the nth degree and compiled a collection of stories known as "Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia.”

The Baron is the coolest, and to some degree, an idol. I guess you could say he has many of the traits I strive to have, many of which are crucial to being a successful artist. Obviously, he is a good problem solver, and of course, he is adept at thinking outside the box. Then there is his sense of playfulness and humor when it comes to solving those problems. And of course, he is a good storyteller…at least the "real" Baron was a good yarn spinner. Yes, it’s true I have been known to embellish for the sake of a good tale.

If you’ve never read the stories, you must….they are fun and ludicrous. And for those who are not readers, you can check out two films. Most recently is Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. This is a wondrous Hollywood film with a star-studded cast.

There is an earlier Czech version that is absolutely stunning and visually imaginative, by the director Karel Zeman. He didn’t have a big budget so he utilized some crazy techniques. There are a few documentaries about him out there and his other films are well worth checking out.

And if you’re ever in Prague…which I highly recommend…right next to the Charles Bridge is a small little museum that features a variety of props and replicas from Karel Zeman’s various film projects. As I said, it’s small, you can do it in about 30-45 minutes, but it’s a lot fun with various interactive gizmos.

So I was going to make this blog post a bit longer, but I have suddenly felt the need to climb up to the moon for teatime.

In the meantime you can check out a few of my found object assemblage interpretations of the Baron’s exploits.

The Baron Goes to the Moon

The Baron and the Large Fish

To The Victor Goes the Found Object - Assemblage and the Spoils of War

Grass skirt and coconut bra = assemblage? Hmmmm….I think not.

So, you may be sitting around wondering: What is the earliest example of assemblage or found objects in art? Maybe you’re not wondering that… it might be just me pondering those kinds of things. In any event, the answer to this lies in how you want to interpret the phrase ‘assemblage.’ The idea with assemblage is that an artist found objects that once had a particular function and then, after being discarded, they are utilized as a medium in a work of art. A transformation of something’s function and purpose. But wait a second, surely using an old iron as a shrine is an example, but what about a coconut shell bikini top? The shell had a function as a coconut, and now it’s a bikini top. A step further, you could say a basket made of grapevines is assemblage… or even further, that a painting on canvas is assemblage because the threads that make up a canvas came from the cotton plant. Well, after a while, you end up with the argument that everything is assemblage because everything came from something else, and while I agree with that from the standpoint of assemblage being a metaphor for the transformation inherent in the universe, that’s really how I view it. For me, I use the term to refer to ‘manmade’ items that are then repurposed.

Early 20th Century Assemblage aka Readymades by, Man Ray (left) and Marcel Duchamp(right)

So, back to the question, what was the earliest example of assemblage? Some say it is the works of Braque and Picasso in the early 1900s or perhaps Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ from around the same time. And though I don’t disagree that these are great examples of the beginning of assemblage and found objects being used in art… I think architecture had been using this process for centuries and centuries.

St. Donatus Zadar, Croatia

Spolia is the term used for the process of assemblage in architecture. The word’s etymology gives a hint as to how this was implemented… spolia means ‘spoils’ or ‘booty.’ It was the process of using art and architecture that had been demolished and using the remnants in new constructions. Sometimes this was pragmatic… why build a totally new column when you have a perfectly sound Roman column? Other times it was financial for much the same reason; after all, material like marble was cheap. Thus you get structures that are a little bit of this and a little bit of that. If you’ve ever been to Seville, Spain, a great example of that is the Giralda tower, which was originally constructed as a minaret during Islamic rule and then when Christians came to power it was modified, but still kept some of the original designs. Personally, I always find it fascinating when you have these styles intermingling.

“Portrait of Four Tetrarch” Venice, Italy. Plundered by Venetians in Constantinople in 1204 AD during the 4th Crusade and brought to Venice. A “neener neener” move if I ever saw one.

Another reason that spolia was used was psychological. Sometimes a culture wanted to taunt the previous culture, and by using bits and pieces of the previous regime’s structures, it was a way of saying ‘neener neener, you lost and we won.’ I remember, a jillion years ago, I was in a little village near Oaxaca and I noticed that the church had stones carved built into the exterior that were quite obviously from some pre-Hispanic structure. One carving was of a Zapotec eagle (if I remember correctly it was toward the top and it had bees flying in and out of a small crack… subsequently I was stung… but that’s another tale worthy of a blog post). A slight variation of the psychological use of spolia, especially in the case of religious sites, is that it was sometimes used as a way of coaxing the conquered into worshipping the ‘new’ gods. A conquering belief system might not seem so foreign if the old gods are present.

The thing is, there could be a variety of reasons spolia was used. It could be all or some of the previous reasons. In fact, it could be because something looked cool, so it was added in a wall or structure, though typically the ‘looked cool’ reason is less documented.

So next time you’re traveling in a land with a long history of variant empires, keep your eyes open. More likely than not, you’re surrounded by early examples of assemblage.