Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object

Book excerpt: In 1912 Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso created the first papiers colles by gluing pieces of oak-grained faux bois wallpaper onto their drawings. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp selected a urinal, signed it R. Mutt, and presented it as an object of art under the title Fountain. In 1919 Kurt Schwitters began gathering scraps of rubbish and assembled them into a series of works that he titled Merz constructions. These acts represent three of the most significant achievements in twentieth-century art. The definitive book on its subject, Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object offers a comprehensive and dynamic history of the mediums that revolutionized our ideas about the nature of art and influenced virtually every major art movement of the twentieth century. Made up of fragments, of debris, of rejected pieces and common artifacts of popular culture, collage and assemblage are arts of protest, of challenge, of exploration. They emphasize the everyday and commonplace over precious materials and refinement; concept and process over end product; the temporary and ephemeral over the lasting. They propose a dislocation in time and space and, by the nature of their makeup, offer multiple layers of meaning. They also furnish a compelling historical record of their time. All these currents are explored by Diane Waldman, deputy director and senior curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In clear and cogent prose, generously illustrated with examples and comparative works, she traces collage, the found object - and the related development, assemblage - from their Cubist beginnings to the present. Waldman moves from the outrageous experiments of the Dadaists in the 1920s to the irreverent debunkings of the 1960s Pop artists to the provocative appropriation art of the 1990s; from the intricate towers and assemblages of the Russian Constructivists early in this century to the surprising piles of materials put together by such midcentury artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and John Chamberlain; from the cerebral and Freudian collages and objects of the Surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s to the probing conundrums posed by the conceptualists of the 1980s and 1990s. A lively book on lively arts, Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object gives us a comprehensive and dynamic view of what are arguably the most important artistic developments of our time.