Symposium art assemblage

Presentation of Return symposium on the art of assemblage of 28 and 29 March 2008

Text Stéphanie Jamet-Chavigny

At the initiative of Françoise Levaillant , director of research in art history at the CNRS, co-head of the ERCO within the Centre André Chastel (UMR 8150), and directed by Stephanie Jamet - Chavigny, a corresponding member of the ERCO, the symposium Back on the art of assembly was held on 28 and 29 March 2008 Vasari room to INHA. It was to question the concept of assembly from exposure founder The Art of Assemblage, organized by William C. SEITZ the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961 who proposed the first genealogy. The project was to study the role held by the assembly in the expanded field of art, to identify principles and also to question posterity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Filiation collage-assembly does it not to be reconsidered in view of a number of critical writings and events which have since renewed the approach? Thinking in terms of the act of construction or homogeneous hybridization, the distinction between these two affiliations is still legitimate? The shares of reuse, recycling, ownership, mixing and by extension diversion directly linked to the practice of the assembly are not the same today as in the sixties. The plurality of contributions solicited researchers, from universities, art schools and museums, allowed to cross approaches used both to the history of art, literature, sociology and anthropology.

Antoinette Romain Le Normand, executive director of the INHA, introducing the two-day search, has put all thoughts under the aegis of Augustus RODIN, echoing the dialectic "fragmentation / assembly" which was analysed in the exhibition The body pieces at the Museum d'Orsay in 1990 and which she had just contributed.
The first session of the symposium was chaired by Françoise Levaillant who recalled having achieved with a team of students in May 1976, the exhibition "Assemblage (s)" MNAM (Palais de Tokyo), from Head Raoul HAUSSMANN, and in connection with a course on another form of dialectics, "carved subject / object," "objects" DADA the compositions of objects Erik DIETMAN through boxes of electrified BRYEN . The introduction of Stephanie Jamet-Chavigny, "Another look at the critical reception of the exhibition The Art of Assemblage", analysed the choice of the term assembly for title of the exhibition New York through the study of archives of MoMA and the Getty Foundation. S. Jamet-Chavigny raised the question of its influence and its impact. Two tracks appeared reading, to understand and consider a different method outlined by Seitz: on the one hand, the one proposed by Allan KAPROW in Blend, Environments and Happenings started in 1960 and published in 1966 and, secondly, that of Leo Steinberg in his essay "The Return of Rodin wrote in 1962 (but published in 1972). As a result a questioning of the modernist conception of Clement Greenberg and an opening on an understanding of the word assembly beyond the question of the object, in a non-artistic, social, even political. Thus, the mythical figure of Western handyman what Robinson Crusoe, has guided reflection initiator of this symposium precisely because it was itself subject to a deep-reading during the twentieth century and in particular in the 1960 l 'Oeuvre Michel TOURNIER Friday or Limbo Pacific. The first day was therefore turned to issues of the art of assembling the heart of the 1960 highlighting the key assumptions raised by the efforts of artists close to the New Realists, Fluxus or the Happening.