I saw some effective art today that could have been made for virtually nothing, most of it at the Paule Anglim Gallery in San Francisco. The front room was full of work created by artist Nayland Blake, made with materials such as plywood, plexiglass, chain, trinkets, and assorted fasteners found on the street. This was classic "my kid could have made that" art: collaged together with materials that may have been fished out of a dumpster. And yet, the pieces have the magic spark of surprise, the genuine hand of creative montage. It's almost impossible to communicate this, but once you've tried to make something interesting out of scrap like this, you might find that it's harder than it looks. A recent visit to the SFMOMA found me amazed yet again at a Rauschenberg painting that I've seen a few times. What always strikes me about this painting is how he arranged the cutout wooden letters at the top to look like a cryptic writing in hebrew or another unidentifiable language. I can plainly see it: I just can't quite figure out how he really did it. It's a kind of magic.

Likewise, Blake's work struck me with the power of somebody who was skilled at assemblage. This work was surprising, engaging, and fun in the way it used forms. In the back room, two other pieces caught my eye: a framed blank canvas with a deer antler protruding from it, the shadow from a no-longer existent light source drawn in pencil. I didn't catch the artist's name. Another piece that I missed the artist's name was a good-sized rock perched atop a large scoop shovel with the handle replaced by a long piece of bamboo. On the end of that long, elegantly drooping piece of bamboo is a small stuffed (fake) songbird. A beautiful contrast of weight.

Any of these works could have been made for free, or nearly so. I find this incredible, the alchemy of artists turning what might be trash into something radically compelling. This re-introduced curiosity of vision, the second look, the renewed vision: this is the quickening of the pulse of art.