Art History

Art History

My Essay: The Art of Assemblage

30/06/16

Assemblage, the three dimensional cousin of collage, is an artistic practice that can be traced back to the beginning of the 20^th century. The word itself was defined in the artistic sense in the 1960’s. Its modern definition is art that is made by assembling dissimilar elements which are often scavenged or bought specifically by the artist.

Assemblage was first introduced by Pablo Picasso, when he began to make his Cubist constructions, starting from 1912. An early example is his “Still Life – 1914”, which was made from scraps of wood and a length of tablecloth fringing, painted and glued together. Picasso used Assemblage intermittently throughout his career.
Consisting of only two materials, I feel that the piece has a beautiful simplicity to it in contrast to the more complex appearance. The colours are very toned down and easy to look at, and the different textured make it more aesthetically appealing.
The use of the tablecloth fringing and the curve that is set upon brings a softer element to a hard and angular piece, while the colour of the material brings a warmth to the predominantly cold piece.
While it has a more polished appearance than some of today’s examples of Assemblage, at the time it was made, it was considered very non-traditional.

Another artist was the Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin, who created his piece “Counter reliefs” in 1914.
When comparing this piece to Picasso’s “Still life”, it is a lot more elegant and polished. I like this piece primarily for his use of wires that stretch across and interact with the main body of the artwork, and because the use of curves make the piece a lot less harsh and sharp. The use of metals contrast greatly with the warmth of the wood, as does the use of copper.
This piece is interesting to me because of the limited variety materials Tatlin chose to use, making the piece very simple, while the wire embodies the empty space around the main body to make the piece a lot more imposing without it being too obtrusive.

Dada artist Marcel Duchampwas born in Blainville, Normandy, and was the son of a notary and the younger brother of the painter Jacques Villon, and Cubist sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon. He studied at the Academie Julian in 1904 to 1905.
His earlier paintings were inspired by Matisse and Fauvism, and in 1911, He made his own brand of Cubism, in which he took earthy colours, mechanical and automatic forms, and a depiction of movement.
He made his first ‘Readymades’ starting in 1913, most notably, “Fountain”, which he made in 1917. He created “Readymades” and “Found Objects” from industrial and natural objects, which he then elevated to artwork by adding an inscription or by including them in exhibitions. His idea was to question the notion of art and the accepted canon, and the adoration of art, which he found “unnecessary”.
“Fountain” is a prime example of how an object can be made into something else entirely be changing the viewer’s perception of the object.  While it can be seen as just an upside down urinal with an inscription painted onto it, Duchamp challenges that by naming it “Fountain”, which makes the object something else.
I like this piece because it challenges the notion of what can be considered artwork. By adding a small inscription or by placing it in a gallery, Duchamp made an object that was so far away from art into artwork.
I like Duchamps use of materials, which for the most part, are very simple and, in the cases of his pieces which have wheels from bikes in them, they possess a delicate and inticate quality when compared to his piece “Fountain”. I like the contrast between these pieces against “Fountain”, which is a lot more solid. Much like Tatlin’s piece “Counter Reliefs”, Duchamps pieces have a polished and sleek appearance.
I admire his motive for creating pieces like “Fountain” because it started to change how we viewed art and therefore opened up more possibilities to create pieces that people wouldn’t necessarily call art.

The first woman to try her hand at Assemblage was Else Von Freytag-Lovinghoven, a German born avant-garde, Dadaist, and poet. She also worked on Assemblage paintings and sculptures, creating art out of rubbish and refuse that she had collected from the streets. She was also known to construct elaborate costumes made from found objects, creating a “kind of living collage” that erased the boundaries between artwork and life.
Her piece “God” from 1917, was supposedly a tongue-in-cheek commentary of Marcel Duchamp’s ambiguous praise of plumbing and bridges being America’s greatest contributions to society.
This piece doesn’t appeal to me as much as the others because of how compact and lacking in colour it is. The materials are the same as chosen by Tatlin, and yet it doesn’t draw in me in.
The thing I like most about the piece is the different textures running through the pipes that were used.

Kurt Schwitters, also a Dada artist, was a german painter, sculptor, writer and typographer who was inspired by Expressionism and Cubism, and created his own brand of Dada called “Merz”, in which he made collages using rubbish materials like lables, old bus tickets and bits of broken wood.
His piece “Merz Konstruction”, made in 1921, was a combination of materials and primary colours layered on top of different pieces. The shapes within the piece were all unusual, and the primary colours were all evenly dispursed throughout the piece. What I liked the most about this piece was the textured of the old wood that came through the paint that had been applied, and also because of his use of a netting like material that, while used limitedly, brought more texture to the piece without being too strong.

Jean Dubuffet’s series “Assemblage d’empreintes” Is where the term Assemblage, in the artistic sense, came from. This series was a multiple collages made using butterfly wings.
To me, the pieces seem a lot more like collage, but regarding William C Seitz’s definition, he was using a material that wasn’t intended for artistic purposes, therefore making it an Assemblage rather than a collage.

Assemblage was exemplified by the works of post-modern artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Louise Nevelson, who accumulated modern objects, such as old shoes, cans, boxes and machine parts. Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines” made use of the assemblage of large physical objects.

Robert Rauschenberg was an American painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer and performance artist. He was considered too much of an individualist to ever be fully part of a movement, but did act as an important bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop-Art.
Rauschenberg’s “Monogram” was part of a series of “Combines” that he made between 1954 and 1964. It was made using a taxidermy Angora Goat, which he found in a second hand store and splattered with paint, a tire, which was wrapped around the goat, and a collage, which the goat and tire is stood on. He named the piece because the union of the tire and the goat reminded him of the intertwining letters of a monogram.
To me, the piece evokes a feeling of discomfort, perhaps because I know that the animal he once used was actually alive. However, I like this piece because of how it makes me feel, and also because it seems like two different pieces joined together simply by placing one on top of the other, which takes the collage under the goat and tire into an assemblage.

Louise Nevelson was a significant Assemblage artist in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Her pieces were wall like and had found objects hidden underneath spray paint. All are very similar in the way they are made, however because of the components used to create the pieces, they are all different.
“Sky Cathedral”, made in 1958, is a solid black, wall like sculpture. I like the piece because while it is one solid colour, the different textures from the multitude of found objects beneath the paint and the different sizes of the objects give the piece more depth, which makes it a lot more interesting to look at. I like that none of the objects are the same, and yet, because they had all been painted the same colour, it unifies them. Because of the colour and number of objects used within the piece, there isn’t a focus in any one particular area.

In 1961, an exhibition at the New York museum of Modern Art held an exhibition called “The Art of Assemblage”. Featured in the exhibition were Assemblages made by artists such as Georges Braque, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray and Kurt Schwitters. It was here that the term “Assemblage” was truly defined. The curator of the exhibition, William C. Seitz wrote that the Assemblages were “Entirely or in part, their constituent elements performed natural or manufactured materials, objects, or fragments not intended as art materials.”

Assemblage began to be used a lot more during the 1960’s and 1970’s in Italy, where the Art Povera movement, literally translated to “Poor Art” It was a radical movement in which the artists explored a range of unconventional processes and non-traditional ‘everyday’ materials, such as soil, rags, and twigs in order to challenge and disrupt the values of the commercialized contemporary gallery systems.

Modern Assemblage has slowly evolved to include installation sculptures. From Robert Rauscheberg’s “Monolith”, made from 1955 to 1959, to Phyllida Barlow’s “TIP”, commissioned by the Tate in 2014.

Phyllida Barlow is a British born artist, born in 1944 in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. She studied at Chelsea College of Art from 1963 to 1966. In the late 60’s, Barlow began to teach at the Slade School of Art, and continued to teach for more than 40 years before retiring in 2009, and was made an Emerita Professor of Fine Art. She was highly influencial to the younger generation of artists, and her students included Turner Prize winner and nominated artists, Rachel Whiteread and Angela de la Cruz.
In 2011, Barlow became a royal Academidian, and in 2015, she was made a CBE for her services to the arts in the Queen’s new year honors.
In 2017, Barlow will represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, a contemporary visual arts exhibition.
Best known for her colossal sculptures, for over 5 decades, Phyllida Barlow has adopted a distinct style, using inexpensive materials such as plywood, cardboard, plaster, cement, fabric and paint to create bold and expansive installations that confront the relationship between objects and the space that surrounds them.
Her piece “TIP”, commissioned in 2014 by the Tate, was one of her largest and most ambitious pieces in London to date.
I like the piece “TIP” because of the sheer scale, and because of how busy it is. It’s birds nest like appearance has an obvious messiness about it, without which, would not emphasize the depth of the piece or the colour. It’s because of this messiness that you can see exposed sculpture, and because of this that wherever you look, there is always something different to see.
The contrast in colours that she used is very powerful, and while the majority of the sculpture is made out of a cold grey tones wood, the bright ribbons of material make it seem a lot brighter and inviting. The lack of uniformity is what makes it the most appealing to me.

I like Pyllida Barlow because of her use of materials, and because her pieces, while being highly colourful, have an underlying industrial feel which I would like to adopt in my own style of working. The contrast of hard materials with fabric and bright colours make her pieces interesting to me, especially her bigger installations.

Within my own work, Phyllida Barlow became a huge influence, inspiring me to actually scavenge for useful materials and collect things I thought could be of good use. I also started experimenting on a bigger scale, and started to consider more how to put something together to make it work.
The way I presented work became a lot more brushed up after I started considering the space around the piece I was presenting, and after I started to think about how I could present something. Much like Barlow’s work, I like to present my pieces in a way so that they cannot be missed, and also so that they interrupt the space and flow around them.
While other artists did influence me and push me to improve my techniques and experimentations, Phyllida Barlow was definitely one of the major contributors and inspirations.

Even though it was nameless and undefined until the early 1960’s, Assemblage is a technique in art that has been used throughout the past century by many different artists from across the world, and has been used throughout numerous different art movements. It began with Picasso’s small Cubism creations, and progressed on to today’s larger modern Assemblage installation artworks.
It is a technique that allows for endless experimentation because it has no guidelines, and for complete freedom in the creation stage.
Because of the nature of the technique, Assemblage creations can be polished and sleek, much like Vladimir Tatlin’s “Counter Reliefs 1914”, or more unpolished, like Robert Rauschenberg’s “Monogram”, and have only the similarity of gathered objects made into a sculpture.
Assemblage appeals to me as a technique because it enables me to experiment more with materials I wouldn’t have considered using before hand, and by experimenting with Assemblage, my understanding of what sculpture is or could be, and how an object can be elevated to artwork by presenting it as one, has been expanded further. Assemblage allows me as an artist to challenge what really is sculpture, and to break the conventions of ‘traditional’ art.
Compared to other art movements, I find this the most interesting because it has no guidelines, and because there is no particular form that you have to follow when making an Assemblage piece, unlike in many other art movements. The freedom that comes along with this technique is astounding, since what makes an assemblage piece is literally an assemblage of objects made into a sculpture. Assemblage to me is a complete breath of fresh , and the creations made using the technique are very unique and captivating.