What Art Elements Are Used in Homage to New York
The Important Artists and Works of Assemblage
Progression of Art
1913
Bicycle Bicycle
While Picasso and Braque invented modern collage past incorporating real objects into their paintings, Marcel Duchamp'south creation of a sculpture from simply mundane objects was the spark that eventually led to Assemblage fine art. The outset of its kind, the work consists of a bicycle bike mounted on a 4-legged stool. Both elements, immediately recognizable, are transformed into something new every bit their everyday functions are disrupted. Rather than meeting the ground, the bike wheel rotates freely and continuously through the air, its circular shape and radiating spokes creating a geometric contrast to the triangular stool, and with the seat of the stool occupied, information technology is no longer available for a sitter and instead becomes a makeshift pedestal. Duchamp wrote, "The Bicycle Cycle is my beginning Readymade, so much so that at commencement it wasn't fifty-fifty chosen a Readymade. Information technology all the same had little to practise with the idea of the Readymade. Rather information technology had more to do with the thought of chance." Every bit he further divers his concept of the readymade, he called this work, an "assisted readymade," indicating the alteration or combination of various found objects, a technique that greatly informed the development of Assemblage every bit a distinctive genre.
The work is too considered a pioneering case of Kinetic Fine art, a trend that emphasized movement in the artwork, and is closely aligned with Assemblage. It was the bicycle wheel's potential for motion that attracted Duchamp, every bit he said, "To set up the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than fabric life of every day." In many ways, the heart of Assemblage can be traced back to Duchamp'due south questioning of definitions of art, originality, and our relation - in ways both good and bad - to the modern, physical world.
Wooden stool, metal bicycle bicycle - Israel Museum, Jerusalem
c. 1920
Mechanischer Kopf (Der Geist Unserer Zeit) (The Mechanical Caput (The Spirit of Our Time))
Various items, including a wooden ruler, a tape mensurate, a watch mechanism, a tin cup, are attached to a wooden model of a caput, once used for making wigs. The piece of work, the only existing Aggregation past Hausmann, conveys Hausmann'due south caustic assessment of the state of his country: "The German wants but his club, his king, his Sunday sermon, and his easy chair...has no more than capabilities than those which hazard has glued on the outside of his skull; his brain remains empty." In improver to being a commentary on the state of the High german people, the subtitle The Spirit of Our Fourth dimension alludes to the influential German philosopher Friedrich Hegel, who thought everything was mind. But art critic Jonathan Jones notes, the "sculpture might be seen equally an aggressively Marxist reversal of Hegel: this is a head whose 'thoughts' are materially determined by objects literally fixed to it... a head that is penetrated and governed by brute external forces."
A leader of Berlin Dada, Hausmann's innovative use of Aggregation creates a sculpture that, past presenting a kind of robotic dummy, challenges the expressivity of the face that one sees in more realistic sculpture. At the aforementioned time, the work speaks to the fragmentation of identity and life that the artist and others experienced in the aftermath of Globe War I.
While Hausmann was known for his innovative photomontage, Mechanical Caput has become his most famous work and is an important touchstone for the contemporary discourse on the cyborg. Equally art historian Matthew Biro wrote, Hasumann established "the cyborg as a figure of modernistic human being identity: the cyborg to correspond the new hybrid human: a half-organic, half-mechanized figure that he believed was appearing with ever greater frequency."
Hairdresser's wigmaking dummy, crocodile wallet, ruler, pocket watch mechanism and case, statuary segment of old photographic camera, typewriter cylinder, segment of measuring tape, collapsible loving cup, the number "22", nails, and bolt - Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
1923-37
Merzbau (Merz Building)
This photo depicts a fractional view of Schwitter's nigh ambitious project - his living infinite in Hanover, transformed by Assemblage into an installation. A vertical and athwart column rises toward a cluster of planes and cubes on the ceiling, while on both sides of the image a profusion of forms both invite and decline a rational reading of the architectural infinite. Destroyed during the 2d World War, but accounts and a few photographs evidence to the original construction. Following her 1924 visit to the site, Dada artist and art historian Kate Steinitz described it as a "iii-dimensional collage of wood, cardboard, iron scraps, broken piece of furniture and picture frames."
Merzbau was a forerunner of what we today telephone call installation, as Schwitters conceived of the space equally an immersive environment where interactivity was a fundamental factor. As art historian Jaleh Mansoor wrote, Merzbau was "a continuous project contradistinct daily, the pocket-sized apertures were often sliced out of a larger mass, or covered over and cached nether the agglomeration of objects, wood or plaster." Fellow Dada artists, including Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hoch, Hans Richter, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, contributed pieces to the installation, which Schwitters originally called the Cathedral of Erotic Misery.
For Schwitters, the work was meant to be the all-consuming culmination of what he called Merz. In 1918, Schwitters began creating the over 2,000 abstract collages, paintings, and drawings that he called Merz. He connected its origins to the traumatic furnishings of World State of war I, explaining, "Things were in terrible turmoil... Everything had broken down and new things had to be fabricated out of the fragments; and this is Merz." Including detritus, such equally film tickets, broken pipes, craven wire, and metal scraps, he said Merz was "the combination of all conceivable materials for creative purposes. And technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials... A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton are factors having equal rights with pigment."
Forced to relocate several times during Earth War Two, Schwitters created multiple Merzbaus, which were destroyed, and he left an unfinished one in England before his death. Based upon the surviving photographs, a reconstruction of the Merzbau was subsequently congenital in Hanover. Contemporary art critic Rachel Cook described visiting the site, "The walls have disappeared behind constructions which comprise a serial of grottoes, columns, shelves and cubes.... The outcome of all this foreign geometry is disorienting and paradoxical. Even equally yous're aggress by a sense that the flooring is shrinking and the ceiling growing ever lower, the construction itself seems somehow to be infinite." Instead of creating a elementary sculpture, Schwitters created a built environment, pushing Assemblage art beyond sculpture and into installation. Here was an art grade that had to be physically experienced - walked through - in social club to be comprehended.
Schwitters became foundational to afterward artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Hamilton who, as a student, helped move and restore part of the third Merzbau in England, and subsequent art movements, including Neo-Dada, Pop Fine art, and Arte Povera.
Pigment, newspaper, cardboard, plaster, glass, mirror, metal, woods, electrical lighting, and other materials - Destroyed in 1943
1936
Object
This iconic Surrealist work presents an ordinary cup, saucer, and spoon lined with fur from a Chinese gazelle, which has been placed so that fur emphasizes the round shape of the cup and the spoon. The work confounds sensual pleasure, as the tactile nature of the fur both attracts the affect of the manus and repeals the oral cavity, the pleasure of drinking from the loving cup stymied. Following the Museum of Modern Art'due south 1936-37 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Alfred H. Barr Jr., the director, noted, "Few works of art in recent years have so captured the popular imagination... The 'fur-lined tea set' makes concretely existent the nearly extreme, the most bizarre improbability."
Oppenheim first unveiled this piece of work at the Exposition surréaliste d'objets in 1936, and it was afterward shown in London and subsequently New York. Breton saw the work as exemplifying Surrealism's aim to "hound the made beast of function," and Max Ernst noted the piece of work's significance with a tone of wry rivalry, "Who covers a soup spoon with precious fur? Who has outpaced us? Trivial Meret." Subsequently, as art critic Alexxa Gotthardt wrote, the pioneering work "began to assume its position every bit a tantalizing expression of Surrealist ideals: a sculpture that joined incongruous parts to create an impossible, uncanny object."
When the Museum of Modernistic Fine art purchased this work in 1936, it marked the offset time the museum had purchased a work past a female person artist. In add-on to being an of import example of Surrealism, the work is also a significant forerunner of the Feminist Art movement.
Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon - The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
1936
Untitled (Soap Bubble Set up)
This shadow box, Cornell's outset endeavor in the signature Assemblage for which he is famous, combines a bird'south egg, a doll's head, a fluted glass, a lather chimera pipe, and four cups, displayed against a print of the moon's geography. The woods and glass planes dividing the box create a sense of geometric guild, framing the soap bubble pipe and the moon, images of elevation and flight, within the box'southward confined space. As art critic Olivia Laing noted of Cornell, "In his own artwork, which he didn't begin until he was about 30, he made obsessive, ingenious versions of the same story: a multitude of found objects representing expansiveness and flight, penned inside glass-fronted cases."
Influenced past Max Ernst's La Femme 100 Têtes (1929), Cornell began to make collages in the early 1930s. He associated with the leading Surrealists and exhibited in the 1932 Surréalisme testify. This work was made for MoMA'southward 1936 Fantastic Fine art, Dada and Surrealism. Equally art critic Jonathan Jones wrote, "From his collections of glass swans, Baedeker guidebooks, clay pipes, compasses and other suggestive souvenirs of the solar day earlier yesterday he invented a new kind of art." Cornell's boxes are at once thoroughly avant-garde, with their connections to the then-current Dada and Surrealism, besides as nostalgic memories of the past, with their allusions to old film actresses, pigeon cotes, and children's pastimes.
While he was well-known amidst New York advanced artists in the 1930s and 1940s, Cornell'south work was but fully recognized in the 1960s, when the Guggenheim Museum held a retrospective in 1967. As Laing noted, "Cornell is seldom given his due in art-history textbooks, which tend to repeat the familiar mail service-state of war narrative in which Robert Rauschenberg and his 'Combines' (Monogram, 1955-59) launched the junk-into-fine art aesthetic in America.... However Cornell directly inspired Rauschenberg'southward early apply of found objects.... 'The only difference between me and Cornell,' Rauschenberg once told me, 'is that he put his piece of work behind glass, and mine is out in the world.'"
Wood, glass, plastic, paper, box construction - Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut
1955-59
Monogram
This famous Assemblage improbably combines a taxidermied Angora goat, wearing a tire around its mid-section, with an abstract painting that includes a tennis ball and strips of wood. The work was prompted by Rauschenberg'southward discovery of the caprine animal in a used furniture store, though he spent four years working out the possible combinations before deciding to attach the goat to the horizontal painting equally if information technology were a pasture. The work evokes surprise and incongruity, as Rauschenberg said, "I wanted to use the surprise.... So the object itself was changed past its context and therefore it became a new thing." The effect of the surprising combination is fabricated more compelling past its employ of undeniably real materials, as the artist said, "I think a pic is more similar the real world when it's fabricated out of the real world."
The piece of work is a culmination of Assemblage's early history, with its combination of readymades, evoking Duchamp, and its wooden platform painting, evoking Schwitters' Merz. As Frances Morris, director of Tate Modernistic said, "Rauschenberg is 1 of those artists who, in the decade afterward the second world state of war, truly transformed the nature of creative practice, smashing through the boundaries of different media." A leader of what was after dubbed Neo-Dada, Rauschenberg called such works "combines," hybrids of sculpture and painting. His work influenced subsequent movements, including Conceptual Fine art, Performance Fine art, and the 1980s Young British Artists, including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
Oil paint, paper, textile, printed reproductions, metallic, forest, prophylactic shoe-heel, and tennis ball on two conjoined canvases with oil on taxidermied Angora goat with contumely plaque and rubber tire on forest platform mounted on 4 casters - Moderna Museet, Stockholm
1958
Sky Cathedral
Nevelson's Assemblage fabricated of boxes and iii-dimensional objects towers against a wall and is painted monochromatically black, giving it a pictorial quality. The allover color minimizes the depth of the objects, but the curving and geometric shapes both extend outward and recede inward, creating inky blackness entrances and crevices every bit if the piece of work were the improbable edifice its title indicates. Nevelson salvaged these boxes, pieces of wood, spindles, dowels, architectural ornaments, and moldings from various structure sites in New York Metropolis before gluing and nailing them together. Nevelson said, "When I look at the urban center from my point of view, I see New York Metropolis as a swell big sculpture." Just every bit much as the Assemblage recalls New York architecture, the monumental piece of work also evokes other mysterious spatial and spiritual realms. By painting the piece black, she unified the individual components and erased their past histories, as she described, black "is the total color. It ways totality. It means: contains all."
Information technology is clear that Nevelson carefully arranged the items in each of the smaller boxes creating intuitive and suggestive compositions, but she later denied being interested in the individual boxes. Initially, the boxes were non nailed together, and the arrangement of the stacked boxes was variable, changing each time it was installed, although eventually Nevelson became more particular almost fixed arrangements.
With its scale, monochromatic color, and allover composition, Nevelson's work can exist seen as a sculptural response to Abstract Expressionist painting that dominated her era, only it too challenges Clement Greenberg, champion of Abstract Expressionism, who emphasized flatness and media specificity, every bit the piece of work's three dimensionality blurs the stardom between sculpture, painting, and installation. While she eschewed feminists labels, Nevelson's work was a primary influence upon subsequent artists, such equally Eva Hesse and later feminists, and also influenced the development of Installation Art in the tardily 1960s.
Painted Forest - The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
1960
Homage to New York
This mechanical and kinetic Assemblage is composed of various constitute objects, including a pianoforte, a go-cart, and a bathtub, forth with autonomous motors, scrap metallic, and mechanical wheels. The monumental work, standing twenty-7 feet tall and originally painted white, was meant to be fix into clanking angular motility, providing a spectacle for the audience, before self-destructing in an explosion, triggered by a control push button. According to the Museum of Modern Fine art, "During its brief operation, a meteorological trial balloon inflated and burst, colored smoke was discharged, paintings were made and destroyed, and bottles crashed to the ground. A player piano, metal drums, a radio broadcast, a recording of the creative person explaining his work, and a competing shrill voice correcting him provided the cacophonic audio runway to the machine's cocky-destruction - until information technology was stopped short by the fire department." Indeed, a mechanical misfire, 27 minutes into the functioning, sparked a fire that destroyed the machine except for a fragment, now in the Museum of Modernistic Art'south collection.
Tinguely pioneered mechanized kinetic Assemblage. As he wrote, "Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist. Don't be subject field to the influence of out-of-engagement concepts. Forget hours, seconds, and minutes. Have instability. Live in fourth dimension. Be static - with movement." The innovative work too emphasized collaboration, equally he worked with engineers, most notably Billy Klüver, and artists, including Robert Rauschenberg who contributed his Money Thrower, which threw silver dollars into the crowd at one betoken in the performance.
Tinguely's concepts have become key to contemporary art, as his influence can be seen in the works of Joep van Lieshout and Hashemite kingdom of jordan Wolfson, as well equally popular events, such as the Burning Man Festival, and fine art projects created by Survival Research Laboratories in San Francisco.
Plant objects, motorized elements - The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
1972
The Liberation of Aunt Jemima
In this Assemblage, an Aunt Jemima figurine, commonly sold equally a pencil and notepad holder to housewives, transformed into a revolutionary, as she holds a burglarize in her hand in addition to a broom and stands among a carpet of cotton. The "mammy" figure emerged in the U.s.a. in the late 1800s and was a grotesque stereotype of black women that was used to sell dwelling appurtenances to women who worked in the home. Continuing in front of wallpaper displaying ads for Aunt Jemima syrup, the figure holds a postcard in front of her. Equally Saar described, "In front of her, I placed a petty postcard, of a mammy with a mulatto child, which is some other way blackness women were exploited during slavery. I used the derogatory image to empower the black woman by making her a revolutionary, like she was rebelling confronting her past enslavement."
The drinking glass vitrine, recalls Joseph Cornell'south surrealist shadow boxes, which she encountered in a 1967 Pasadena Art Museum exhibition, as well every bit Andy Warhol's gridded, Pop Art screen prints of Marilyn Monroe and other celebrities. In this early work, she turns her influencers into a piece of work of social and political protest. Subsequently, she began collecting racist and derogatory items at local chiliad sales, and noted, "My work started to go politicized afterwards the death of Martin Luther King in 1968. But The Liberation of Aunt Jemima...was the get-go piece that was politically explicit. There was a community middle in Berkeley, on the edge of Black Panther territory in Oakland, called the Rainbow Sign. They issued an open invitation to black artists to be in a show well-nigh black heroes, so I decided to make a black heroine." In 1960s Los Angeles, a number of African American artists turned to Assemblage, including David Hammons and John Outterbridge. They saw in it a mode to bridge not only art and life, but the personal and the political, appropriating (and re-appropriating) racist images and objects and giving them new meanings. Equally fine art historian Caroline A. Miranda writes, "In Saar's hands...these notorious artifacts became something mighty," and the noted activist Angela Davis credits this piece of work as the get-go of the black women's movement. Saar's piece of work continues to concenter contemporary attention, as seen in her 2019 solo exhibition at New York'south Museum of Modernistic Art.
Mixed media - University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Moving picture Annal, Berkeley, California
1982
Long Term Parking
This awe-inspiring work, standing 50 feet high, is an Assemblage of 60 cars embedded in concrete. Made of twoscore,000 pounds of concrete, the work, as art critic Nessia Pope writes, "makes evident the undeniable mass of objects and our relationship to them by underlining the proportions of the cars and of the column they composed with that of a human being."
In 1960, Arman began developing Assemblages that he called "accumulations," which according to Pope, transformed the objects "into a new amalgamated object - a unique kind of sculpture." His works ranged from a collection of gas masks in a Plexiglas case to his famous and controversial Full Up (1960), where he filled the Galerie Iris Clert with trash collected from the Paris streets. With Long Term Parking, he as well pioneered the utilize of Assemblage every bit public art. Every bit he noted, "The perfect knowledge of the visual impact of objects is a function of my work. I take a very simple theory. I accept always pretended that objects themselves formed a self-composition. My composition consisted of assuasive them to etch themselves."
To make this piece of work he selected the various cars, almost all by French auto makers, by noting particular cars he saw driving by and and so finding the same model in a junkyard. Earlier embedding the cars in concrete, they were restored and painted to heighten their visual effect. Over time, the pigments take faded, and exposed elements have begun to suffer some corrosion, reflecting Arman'due south view that over a long period of fourth dimension, the cars would eventually began to plummet, leaving their empty space in the physical as a wry comment on the disposable nature of consumer culture. His accumulations profoundly influenced subsequent artists, including Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Martha Rosler.
Automobiles in concrete - Chateau de Montcel, Jouy-en-Josas, France
2012
Meta-Monumental Garage Sale
Ordered for the flow of traffic, this "garage sale" at New York's Museum of Modernistic Art includes corking rows of used furniture, brandish tables, two tents housing other items, a machine, and a multitude of objects hung on the walls, from article of clothing to prints. A large flag and a sign reading "SAVE MONEY $" with an arrow painting downwardly hang from the upper floor. Here, the Assemblage of disparate elements are not composed into a single work of art, but instead arranged separately in a large space, creating more of an installation to walk through than a sculpture to behold. Rosler supervised the effect, for which she had also hired performance artists and actors to work the floor, and produced two bug of a pamphlet, including faux coupons fabricated to resemble a newspaper. As Rosler noted, "The garage sale is well-nigh social and economic relations. It is a performance with an accompanying 'soundtrack.' Most visitors don't expect beyond the fun and the bargains. That is why nosotros needed this publication to function as it did, to offer news, history, notes, and critique. The themes of the 2 issues were The Social Lives of Objects and Piece of work, Value, and Waste."
Rosler held her first garage auction, the Monumental Garage Sale, in 1973, and said it "was prompted by my interest in commodity fetishism in the suburban world I was now inhabiting.... [It]... was as much about social transactions as about the exchange of money for goods." Reprised frequently, and also reconfigured every bit her Traveling Garage Sales, Rosler's apply of Assemblage masterfully challenges aesthetic categories and assumed boundaries between art and life. Every bit art critic Randy Kennedy noted, the Meta-Monumental Garage Auction was not a usual garage sale, only "a piece of performance fine art in which a garage sale is enacted." Simply the items are sold, making the event, as Rosler said, "...not symbolic action. It's real activity. Like nearly things, it has symbolic dimensions. But it is what it is."
Various items
1998
My Bed
This controversial and iconic piece of work consists of the creative person's bed, linens strewn and stained, along with various items, including empty liquor bottles, used condoms, old newspapers, slippers, and underwear. Conveying an emotional rawness and plucked from real life, here Assemblage takes on a confessional quality in an installation that besides shocks. As art critic Jonathan Jones wrote, Emin's works "remain apartment, unredeemed; she transfigures cypher. But in many means Emin'due south accomplishment is the aforementioned as Caravaggio's: she rubs our noses in reality, in a style that subverts all our illusions, fantasies, snobberies and repressions, those barriers we put upwardly between us and death." In assembling these items, Emin does not transfigure them into something more artful or artful but insists that the viewer confront them for what they are and how that might make for discomfort.
Emin said the work was "a self-portrait, but non i that people would like to run across." She explained the origins of the piece of work: "I had a kind of mini nervous breakdown in my very small flat and didn't go out of bed for iv days." When she was finally able to crawl out of bed, she described, "And then I idea, 'What if here wasn't hither? What if I took out this bed...and placed it into a white space? How would information technology await so?' And at that moment I saw it, and information technology looked fucking brilliant. And I thought, this wouldn't exist the worst place for me to die; this is a beautiful identify that'southward kept me alive."
Noting how the piece of work evokes Rauschenberg's Bed (1955), Jonathan Jones described Emin's innovation: "By lucky take a chance I saw Rauschenberg's Bed again in New York a few weeks ago. In fact, the comparison helped me sympathise Emin's originality. Rauschenberg's bed is splattered with paint and...hangs on the wall.... Rauschenberg makes it quite articulate that a transformation has taken place. Emin's bed, by contrast, has no aesthetic additions... information technology is simply there, a messy fact, and a decade on, refuses to be annihilation else. Information technology now looks like one of the truly corking readymades."
Shown at the Sagacho Exhibition Infinite in Tokyo in 1998, this work became iconic and exemplary of Young British Artists'south emphasis on shock and spectacle, and later led to her existence shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Emphasizing a messy and autobiographical reality, her work has redefined Assemblage for contemporary artists such every bit Song Dong and Tokomo Takahashi, whose installations include accumulations of autobiographical objects, displayed in their original anarchy.
Box frame, mattress, linens, pillows and diverse objects - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom
Content compiled and written past Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Valerie Hellstein
"Assemblage Definition Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added past Valerie Hellstein
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First published on 15 April 2020. Updated and modified regularly
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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/assemblage/artworks/
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