ABOUT THE WORK

Contraband is a mixed-media construction from 1961. With her eyes failing as a result of cataracts and unsuccessful corrective surgeries, Sage in her final years abandoned painting and turned instead to producing constructions and collages. These fascinating late works are a testament to Sage’s irrepressible creativity even as her ability to paint collapsed. Sage created these mixed-media pieces out of a variety of materials, including wooden sticks, glass beads and marbles, wire, small stones, and other small-scale elements, often gluing them to paper mounts. Though at first glance these collages seem to have little to do with her paintings, the appearance of wooden sticks, often arranged in rectilinear forms, parallel the sticks and scaffolds in her painted work. And because of the three-dimensionality of these collages, they cast actual shadows of the kind frequently seen in her paintings.

Sage showed seventeen of her later works, including Contraband, in Your Move, a November 1961 solo exhibition devoted exclusively to her collages and constructions held at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York. This was the last exhibition of her work held in her lifetime. The title of the show refers to one of the pieces in it, called Your Move (1961, Mattatuck Museum; see Judith D. Suther, A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist [Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1997], illus. [n. p.]), a chessboard where all of the pieces are bullet cartridges. The mounting tensions and apparent irrationality of the Cold War cannot be discounted as a backdrop to this exhibition (the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred the following year, Dr. Strangelove played in theaters two years after that), as the militarized chessboard of Your Move and Nuclear Tension (1961, Mattatuck Museum; see Suther, illus. [n. p.]), another work in the show, make amply clear. More generally, all of the works included in the exhibition can be interpreted as surrealist games or jeux, which echoed the literary jeux of surrealist literature (e.g., exquisite corpse). Kay’s jeux are irrational and inscrutable, with no apparent order or rules. For the exhibition, Sage also wrote a poem that makes the apparent arbitrariness of these games perfectly clear. The poem reads:

These are games without issue

some have been played

and are therefore static

others will be

and can still be played

there are no rules

no one can win or lose

they are arbitrary

and irrelevant

but there is no reason why

anything should mean more

than its own statement

two and two

do not necessarily make four. . .

 If that is a scientist at my door

please tell him

to go away.

Sage also carefully directed the design of the catalogue, which paired each line of verse on one page with a photograph of one of the collages facing it on the other. (The catalogue itself is a fascinating primary document, almost a work of art in itself.) The poem and the artworks are inseparable. The Viviano exhibition as a whole is an attack on the Cold War mentality, subverting its purported rationality by her “games without issue.”

Contraband is included in the catalogue raisonné of Sage’s work, by Stephen Robeson Miller under the auspices of Mark Kelman and Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York.