Unmonumental: Going to pieces in the 21st Century, Laura Hoptman, 2007.

One of the key featuresof modernity is that everything is able to be altered by human intervention. Everythingis available and we can make anything in congruence with modernity, aclassification of art. Though the subject matter of theart has changed from being what it is to how it’s done.

Assemblage is therelevance of time and the artist who incorporated the concepts into the piecesthroughout time. Laura Hoptman expresses that assemblage is the placement ofpreform materials, objects or fragments that weren’t intended to be art materialswith juxtaposition to one another. She states that theapex of assemblage can be identified as Robert Rauschenberg’s series ‘Combines,’hybrids of paintings and sculptures that the artist produced from 1954 to 1964.

John Cage (A leading figure of post-war avant-garde who wasRauschenberg’s friend and mentor) memorably compared the structure of ‘Combine’to that of a newspaper. He wrote, “there is no more subject in a Combine thanthere is in a page from a newspaper.”

Sculptors incorporating assemblage into their work have stuck by theguidance and outline of Rauschenberg’s ‘Combine’ though towards the 21^stcentury artistic visions toward assemblage progressively altered. Theaesthetics of the piece became increasingly secondary to the perception. Thisshift can be seen in Rachel Harrison’s, Huffy Howler (2004) which almost mocks andcriticizes the work of the ‘Combine’ and its theory.

Though neo-avant-garde art of the post war period resembles works ofpre-World War II, they’re classified merely as masquerades of the earliermovement. Though visually consistent, they are completely different in meaning.The audience, assigned a new meaning to this period of art.

The strategies of assemblage and appropriation inneo-neo-avant-garde 1980’s art practice mimicked its predecessors - replacingindustrial elegance with found objects. Such products of object culture portrayedthe “idea that the readymade has been so absorbed that the object from life isas obvious a material for art as oil paint.”

Assemblage more so than any other art practice can be regarded as amirror to contemporary visual culture, a physical representation of socialvalues in 1960’s urban culture. Pieces began to embody such mentalities aspolitical dissatisfaction, sexual malaise, bad education etc. The best of theseworks, are highly organised “internarratives that are more often than notparticipatory in contemporary art as well as political discourse.”

‘Unmonumental’ was a term developed to describe the kind ofsculpture that lacks the characteristics of the ‘monument.’ These new formshold a distinct sense of possibility where both physical and ideologicalfractures are common.

In this new century that could be classified as an error of customization,artists act as the social commentators forming “irreproducible one-offs.”Though most sculptures from the last five years have a common aesthetic ofassemblage, this doesn’t imply that this mode is “aesthetically dominant.”Assemblage represents a movement towards customization and a general longingfelt for individuality and uniqueness.