What do you call art with objects?
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 art that is made by assembling disparate elements – often everyday objects – scavenged by the artist or bought specially for the purpose.
An artist of this example is Joseph Cornell (1903 – 1972), an American visual artist and filmmaker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. He was largely self-taught in his artistic efforts and improvised his own original style incorporating cast-off and discarded artifacts.
Each of Cornell’s works have a unique story and representation for the objects that create a scene. For example, the work ‘A Parrot for Juan Gris’ can represent a story from around the world, this idea is given using an image of a parrot and use of foreign texts, maps and floral imagery in the background to help portray the bigger scene.
A Found Object
“A found object is a natural or man-made object, or fragment of an object, that is found (or sometimes bought) by an artist and kept because of some intrinsic interest the artist sees in it.”
Sometimes referred to by the French term for found object ‘objet trouvé’, Found Objects may be put on a shelf and treated as works of art in themselves, as well as providing inspiration for the artist. For example, sculptor Henry Moore collected flints and bones which he seems to have treated these as natural sculptures as well as sources and inspiration for his own works.
This image is of the sculpted work by Moore called ‘Animal Head,’ created in 1951.
‘Moore tended to find inspiration for his work in natural forms. Although cast in plaster, this sculpture has the appearance of a pebble or piece of worn bone, an indefinable organic form that takes on the identity of some hybrid animal. The ghostly, grotesque quality of Animal Head, like other works by Moore, carries connotations of decay and mortality.’
- Gallery label, September 2016
Moore also created a piece called ‘Head of Serpant,’ created in 1927. It ‘is a small, wall-mounted stone sculpture of a snake-like head thrusting forward from a circular base. Sharply incised narrow ovals on either side of the smoothly rounded head indicate the serpent’s eyes. Its jaws are improbably thick and seen from the side the snake seems to smile. Inside its mouth are two triangular notches and, mysteriously, two neatly drilled holes.’
Created in 1927, when Moore was working as a tutor at the Royal College of Art in London, he had taken up a teaching post in the sculpture department in 1924 after gaining his diploma from the college and continued working there until 1931. Although nothing is known about the precise circumstances in which ‘Head of Serpent’ was made, it was probably carved at Moore’s studio, 3 Grove Studio, Adie Road, Hammersmith, where Moore lived and worked between 1926 and 1929.
The sculpture is numbered 45 in the artist’s catalogue raisonné of 1957, which notes that it was made in the autumn of 1927.
In my opinion, all of these works have inspired me to work with different materials in ways that they could be developed in second or third dimensions. Just like the Parrot piece as been made with different types of media’s, like third dimensional objects and newspaper clippings from the area that it was inspired from, and Moore’s work are more third dimensional with it being sculpted by hand, like all angles and edges.
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