“‘The Art of Assemblage’ At 50”

The extended concept of “assemblage” proposed by William Seitz in his 1961 MoMA exhibition, “The Art of Assemblage”, has proved one of the most durable, if protean, legacies of twentieth-century avant-garde practice. Encompassing both art and anti-art – and freely constituted of what is made or ready-made, found or otherwise re-claimed and re-purposed – notable examples of “assemblage” include Cubist, Dada and Surrealist collages and objects, Picasso’s and González’s welded-steel sculptures, Rauschenberg’s “Combines” and Arman’s “Accumulations”. Since the 1960s “assemblage” has been critically reexamined in provocative scholarship and exhibitions including, most recently, the New Museum’s “Unmonumental” shows. All at once, then, the term is emblematic of twentieth-century Modernism, of its unrepressed other in popular culture and, increasingly, of how the global reach of consumerism might nevertheless be fragmented and dispersed as an array of local effects. This session seeks papers that question the category of “assemblage” as a critical practice or discursive field; that address specific moments in the history and transformation of “assemblage” in modern and contemporary art; or that examine the 1961 exhibition itself, its critical precursors or historical reformulations.

Paper proposal form is available at: http://www.secollegeart.org/annual-conference.html

Please submit completed form to: edward.powers@qc.cuny.edu