Assemblage is an artistic form or medium usually created on a defined substrate that consists of three-dimensional elements projecting out of or from the substrate. It is similar to collage, a two-dimensional medium. It is part of the visual arts, and it typically uses found objects, but is not limited to these materials.
Technique
The assemblage is obtained by incorporating into a work of art not specifically artistic three-dimensional materials and “found objects”, ie everyday objects that, elevated to the state of the art, allow artists to challenge the traditional idea of art itself. Initially it takes inspiration from the collage.
“Space, in the assemblage, does not exert any ‘syntax’, does not impose any ordering principle”: “no point of view” is “privileged”, since “every trait” wants to “be equally impressive”. Furthermore there are no rules for its realization: “the cluster of heterogeneous materials can proliferate at will”.
Features
Assemblage is one of the most used expressive techniques in the 20th century and presents numerous affinities with the mechanisms of the collection, which it uses to achieve formal and semantic coherence. In fact, the faculty of bringing together freely and in the same place materials of nature, from different eras and countries, has long been the exclusive prerogative of collectors; the collection itself can be considered as “the greatest possible assemblage”.
The awareness that objects, once assembled, can acquire great strength, derives from the idea of collection and assemblage. In the collection the object is given new roots, a new semantic depth in contact with everything that surrounds it.
History
The origin of the art form dates to the cubist constructions of Pablo Picasso c. 1912–1914. The origin of the word (in its artistic sense) can be traced back to the early 1950s, when Jean Dubuffet created a series of collages of butterfly wings, which he titled assemblages d’empreintes. However, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso and others had been working with found objects for many years prior to Dubuffet. Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin created his “counter-reliefs” in the mid 1910s. Alongside Tatlin, the earliest woman artist to try her hand at assemblage was Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the Dada Baroness. In Paris in the 1920s Alexander Calder, Jose De Creeft, Picasso and others began making fully 3-dimensional works from metal scraps, found metal objects and wire. In the U.S., one of the earliest and most prolific assemblage artists was Louise Nevelson, who began creating her sculptures from found pieces of wood in the late 1930s.
In the 1950s and 60s assemblage started to become more widely known and used. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns started using scrappy materials and objects to make anti-aesthetic art sculptures, a big part of the ideas that make assemblage what it is.
The painter Armando Reverón is one of the first to use this technique when using disposable materials such as bamboo, wires, or kraft paper. In the thirties he made a skeleton with wings of mucilage, adopting this style years before other artists. Later, Reverón made instruments and set pieces such as a telephone, a sofa, a sewing machine, a piano and even music books with their scores.
The sum of these experiences, germinated from the concept of accumulation and assemblage, lead some artists to search for a new concept of space and a more refined approach. The first signs are manifested in Italy, in particular in the work of Alberto Burri, to whom Arte povera owes, albeit to a lesser extent than that of Piero Manzoni and the use of the latter of the modern object, fruit of the revisitation of the Dadaist, Surrealist and Neorealist examples. The new assemblages are set in the spaces of art galleries.
In 1961, the exhibition “The Art of Assemblage” was featured at the New York Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition showcased the work of early 20th-century European artists such as Braque, Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters alongside Americans Man Ray, Joseph Cornell, Robert Mallary and Robert Rauschenberg, and also included less well known American West Coast assemblage artists such as George Herms, Bruce Conner and Edward Kienholz. William C Seitz, the curator of the exhibition, described assemblages as being made up of preformed natural or manufactured materials, objects, or fragments not intended as art materials.
Since the mid-sixties, several Italian artists have been practicing the installation and transforming the object, gradually abandoning the essence of ready-made or objet trouvé. The assemblage is stripped of every constructive characteristic: the empty space remains the fundamental reference, but the work in it highlights first of all the material, the gesture, the idea. These are isolated examples, since outside of Italy the expression is often still tied to the Dadaist spirit, as in the case of Joseph Beuys, and to the concept of the collection, to the idea of accumulation.
Art
In sculpture, Auguste Rodin introduced the technique of assemblage as an innovative method of working from about 1895 onwards. The artist created a reservoir of casts, reductions and enlargements of already created works, from which he was able to open up new contexts of meaning through a new combination of bodies, heads, arms, legs and other sculptural elements.
Later, but before the art-historical establishment of the term, artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Louise Nevelson, Wolfgang Paalen, Raoul Hausmann and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven worked with the combination of preformed natural or manufactured materials, objects or fragments. Picasso’s use of a variety of found materials (wood, metal, glass) and objects, which he assembled into a new whole, is well known. Examples are Picasso’s bull skull (Tête de taureau), from 1940 and 1942, a combination of bicycle handlebar and saddle, the absinthe glass or theWoman with baby carriage. Picasso used the artistic process as early as 1912 for three-dimensional cubist constructions.
The term Assemblage was taken in the 1950s by Jean Dubuffet to designate one of his groups of works. In 1961 he was taken over by William C. Seitz, one of the curators of the MoMA exhibition The Art of Assemblage. As a result of this strongly received exhibition, the term has entered art history literature.
Artists such as Alberto Burri, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Cornell, Edward Kienholz, Louise Nevelson, Martial Raysse, Hans Salentin and Kurt Schwitters incorporated this evolution of collage into their work.
Daniel Spoerri developed his trap paintings as assemblages, Robert Rauschenberg combined assemblage with painting to Combine Paintings, while Christo and Jeanne-Claude further developed the assemblage of packaging art. The accumulation of Nouveaux Réalistes can also be seen as a development or a related phenomenon. Wolf Vostell began in the late 1950s to integrate television sets in his object images. He created sculptures that combined painting, car parts, televisions, video cameras and monitors.
Artists primarily known for assemblage
Arman (1928–2007), French artist, sculptor and painter.
Hans Bellmer (1902–1975), a German artist known for his life-sized female dolls, produced in the 1930s.
Wallace Berman (1926–1976), an American artist known for his verifax collages.
André Breton (1896–1966), a French artist, regarded as a principal founder of Surrealism.
John Chamberlain (1927–2011), a Chicago artist known for his sculptures of welded pieces of wrecked automobiles.
Greg Colson (born 1956), an American artist known for his wall sculptures of stick maps, constructed paintings, solar systems, directionals, and intersections.
Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), Cornell, who lived in New York City, is known for his delicate boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged surprising collections of objects, images of renaissance paintings and old photographs. Many of his boxes, such as the famous Medici Slot Machine boxes, are interactive and are meant to be handled.
Rosalie Gascoigne (1917–1999), a New Zealand-born Australian sculptor.
Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971), an Austrian artist and writer and a key figure in Berlin Dada, his most famous work is the assemblage Der Geist Unserer Zeit – Mechanischer Kopf (Mechanical Head [The Spirit of Our Age]), c. 1920.
Romuald Hazoumé (born 1962), a contemporary artist from the Republic of Bénin, who exhibits widely in Europe and the U.K.
George Herms (born 1935), an American artist known for his assemblages, works on papers, and theater pieces.
Louis Hirshman (1905–1986), a Philadelphia artist known for his use of 3D materials on flat substrates for caricatures of the famous, as well as for collages and assemblages of everyday life, archetypes and surreal scenes.
Robert H. Hudson (born 1938), an American artist.
Jasper Johns (born 1930), an American Pop artist, painter, printmaker and sculptor.
Edward Kienholz (1927–1994), an American artist who collaborated with his wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, creating free-standing, large-scale “tableaux” or scenes of modern life such as the Beanery, complete with models of persons, made of discarded objects.
Lubo Kristek (born 1943), a Czech artist known for his critical assemblages of bones, traps, material cast out by the sea, waste and mobile phones (destructed in a happening).
Jean-Jacques Lebel (born 1936), in 1994 installed a large assemblage entitled Monument à Félix Guattari in the Forum of the Centre Pompidou.
Janice Lowry (1946–2009), American artist known for biographical art in the form of assemblage, artist books, and journals, which combined found objects and materials with writings and sketches.
Ondrej Mares (1949–2008), a Czech-Australian artist and sculptor best known for his ‘Kachina’ figures – a series of works.
Markus Meurer (born 1959), a German artist, known for his sculptures from found objects
Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), an American artist, known for her abstract expressionist “boxes” grouped together to form a new creation. She used found objects or everyday discarded things in her “assemblages” or assemblies, one of which was three stories high.
Minoru Ohira (born 1950), a Japanese-born artist.
Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985), a German-born Swiss artist, identified with the Surrealist movement.
Wolfgang Paalen (1905–1959), an Austrian-German-Mexican surrealist artist and theorist, founder of the magazine DYN and known for several assembled objects, f.e. Nuage articulé
Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), painter and collagist known for his mixed media works during six decades.
Fred H. Roster (born 1944), an American sculptor.
Betye Saar (born 1926), American visual artist primarily known for her assemblages with family memorabilia, stereotyped African American figures from folk culture and advertising, mystical amulets and charms, and ritual and tribal objects.
Alexis Smith (born 1949) is an American artist best known for assemblages and installations.
Daniel Spoerri (born 1930), a Swiss artist, known for his “snare pictures” in which he captures a group of objects, such as the remains of meals eaten by individuals, including the plates, silverware and glasses, all of which are fixed to the table or board, which is then displayed on a wall.
Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), a Russian artist known for his counter-reliefs—structures made of wood and iron for hanging in wall corners in the 1910s.
Wolf Vostell (1932–1998), known for his use of concrete in his work. In his environments video installations and paintings he used television sets and concrete as well as telephones real cars and pieces of cars.
Gordon Wagner (1915–1987), was a pioneer in American assemblage art, who was known for his bazaar art, painting, poetry and writing.
Jeff Wassmann (born 1958), an American-born contemporary artist who works in Australia under the nom de plume of the pioneering German modernist Johann Dieter Wassmann (1841–1898).
Tom Wesselmann (1931–2004), an American Pop artist, painter, sculptor and printmaker.
H. C. Westermann (1922–1981), an American sculptor and printmaker.
Philosophy
The French authors Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Félix Guattari (1930-1992) have constructed a sociological theory around the concept of assemblage: they do not understand assemblages of similarities as assemblages, but a “contingent ensemble of practices and objects between which can (and) be aligned along the axes of territoriality and de-territorialization. In doing so, they argue that certain mixtures of technical and administrative practices open up new spaces and make them understandable by deciphering and re-coding environments. The Mexican philosopher Manuel De Landa(* 1952) has further developed this view in a theory of assemblage.
By contrast, US sociologist and economist Saskia Sassen does not use the term for theory, but in a descriptive way.
Source from Wikipedia