What Is Assemblage? A Look Into 3D Collage Techniques

Assemblage is a three-dimensional technique of art. Artists combine three-dimensional objects into sculptural forms that add new contexts to familiar forms and things. Assemblage is a characteristic rather than a category: different artists in different eras invented various names for such constructions. Vladimir Tatlin called them Counter-Reliefs, and Kurt Schwitters used the mysterious term Merz. The technique of assemblage was popular among Cubists, Dadaists, and Pop Artists.

Assemblage is a three-dimensional technique of art making. To create an assemblage, artists compile unrelated fragments and elements into a single whole. These fragments are usually everyday objects that were found or purchased by the artist. The term assemblage was coined by the French artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1950s. Dubuffet worked with a variety of materials and techniques and constantly looked for alternatives to traditional forms of art. He was famous for his invention of art brut, meaning rude art, created by untrained artists outside of the domain of the official art world. Surely, the phenomenon of art brut existed well before Dubuffet, yet he managed to indicate this phenomenon and study it, amassing a large collection of works.

Dubuffet himself created collages and assemblages from various objects, including real butterfly wings, straws, broken bottles, and grapevines. Still, although Dubuffet was the first one to approach assemblage from the theoretical point of view,  he was certainly not the first artist to apply this technique. Usually, art historians refer to the Cubist art movement as the pioneering one in the use of assemblage and collage. One of the first works that added three-dimensional elements to the painted surface was Pablo Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning. The still life represented a scene happening at a busy Parisian cafe and incorporated a fragment of a chair seat. Conceptually speaking, assemblage is a rather fluid category, existing in between collage (its two-dimensional alternative), sculpture, and installation. Some works featured fragments of painting, which made them even more difficult to categorize.

The use of found objects is an integral part of the assemblage technique. The artists appropriate objects that they either purchased or literally found throughout their everyday lives and repurpose them in a way that drastically alters their meanings and contextual frameworks. Usually, such objects retain their original form and stay recognizable. Still, artists are looking for angles and contexts that could bring something unusual or unexpected to familiar things.

Assemblage usually consists of such objects. At the time when found objects appeared in modern art, they were considered ridiculous and offensive by art critics and the public. Still, as the art world moved forward, the notion of conceptual art, which valued artistic ideas more than their physical form, radically transformed the approach to found objects. Even today, with the wide presence of multimedia technologies, found object assemblages are frequently present at contemporary art exhibitions and fairs.

Famous Assemblage Artists: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was one of the pioneers of assemblage and installation, but she was unfairly ignored by the art world. She was also one of the most prominent Dada artists, far too eccentric for the wider public to accept. Despite the loud, noble title, she lived in poverty most of her life. She received the Baroness title from one of her short-lived marriages to a German Baron. Elsa was the living embodiment of Dada. She was loud, absurd, and shocking for many. She wore tomato cans and curtain rings as jewelry and used post stamps instead of makeup.

The Baroness had a notoriously crude and often scatological sense of humor, and her artworks—mostly assemblages and performances—expressed it fully. Not many artworks by Elsa have survived, but the remaining few of them present a surprising new perspective on the history of art. Her assemblage God, built from plumbing traps and pipes, was strikingly similar in concept to another iconic sculpture by a close friend of the Baroness—Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.

Duchamp’s Fountain had almost no signs of artistic involvement except for the signed pseudonym found on the side of the overturned urinal. Other works by Duchamp, however, had a more complex structure. Duchamp’s assemblages included a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool or a set of intricate mechanisms with no apparent purpose hidden in a small leather-covered box.

The content of Duchamp’s works often referred to his contemporary issues of gender, sexuality, and social order. While his friend Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven presented herself as the force of crude instinct, Duchamp was her antithesis—a reserved and quiet intellectual. Still, their influence was mutual, as each represented the necessary opposite.

Kurt Schwitters

Another Dadaist who extensively used assemblage in his works was Kurt Schwitters, one of the movement’s pioneers. For his assemblage works, Schwitters used the invented word Merz, the shortened German word Kommerz (meaning commerce). Such a term explained the origins of his works, as they were constructed from objects that anyone could buy in a regular store. Schwitters aimed to construct an aesthetical system based on the world of consumer goods, instruments, and packages. He used candy wrappers, buttons, coins, nails, and other discarded objects for his complex compositions.

As Schwitters continued his work, Merz developed into an all-encompassing philosophy that sometimes was used as a synonym for Dada. His most monumental work was the Merzbau, his family house in Hanover, transformed into a large-scale installation using pieces of refuse similar to his smaller assemblages. Unfortunately, Merzbau did not survive World War II and was destroyed during the Allied bombing raid in 1943.

Meret Oppenheim was a Swiss surrealist who was well-known for her assemblages. She constructed them from familiar objects bought in department stores, usually those associated with women and their socially acceptable activities. However, the results were often surprising and far removed from presupposed feminine gentleness and domestic bliss. A porcelain teacup wrapped in gazelle fur turned from chic to menacing and disquieting. A pair of white heels on a plate, tied up like a roasted chicken, evokes associations not with festive dinner but with bondage and fetish. Through assemblage, Oppenheim expressed the duality of symbols, their ambiguity, and the dark undertones of the social norms.

Vladimir Tatlin

Soviet Constructivist artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin never managed to receive any proper artistic education, yet he became one of the most influential modernist figures. Tatlin was Kazimir Malevich’s opponent who preached the supremacy of form and color. Tatlin, on the contrary, believed form must follow function, and the physical impression of the work defined its visual characteristics. According to a legend, he once knocked a chair out from under Malevich, stating he should “try and sit on geometry and color.”

Unlike most artists from the Russian Empire, Tatlin was able to travel to Europe and see French and German avant-garde art, including cubist pieces. After his European tour, he developed a concept of Counter-Reliefs, assemblages made from wood and metal. He saw them as examples of non-objectivity unrelated to any existing object, questioning the traditional rules of art. The aesthetical concept of counter-reliefs was solely the contrast of materials used for their construction.

Louise Nevelson was a Ukrainian-born American artist associated with late-stage Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. Her most famous works are assemblages consisting of wooden boxes and compartments fixed together and colored in a single tone. These compartments often hide small sculptures, found objects, or artistic instruments. A single color that covers all these fragments distracts the viewer from the purposes of each and focuses their attention solely on forms and textures. Nevelson created a multi-sensory environment that completely immersed her audiences in the exploration of familiar things.

Robert Rauschenberg: The Master of Neo-Dadaist Assemblage

Robert Rauschenberg experimented with everyday objects he found on the streets of New York, including scrap metal, tires, soap dishes, and pieces of fabric. Rauschenberg bought some objects, like pieces of furniture of taxidermied animals, in second-hand stores.

The artist called his assemblages Combines and claimed they were supposed to bridge the gap between art and reality and also show the beauty found in everyday objects. His most famous Combine, called Monogram, featured a taxidermied goat. Rauschenberg reworked the original piece twice, dissatisfied with the relationship between used objects—the goat, his painting, and a tire. The final and most well-known version featured the goat placed at the center of a wooden platform that Rauschenberg covered with paintings and found objects.