Visual Arts

Collage has a relatively short, but incredibly rich history. The popularity of collage is on the increase again, partly as a result of such postmodernist concerns as pluralism, multiplicity and hybridity. This book features works by international artists Picasso, Schwitters and Ernst, through to Hannah Hoch, Martha Rosler, John Stezaker, Richard Hamilton, Layla Curtis, David Salle, Eduardo Poalozzi, Javier Rodriguez, Robert Rauschenberg, Mimei Thompson, David Thorpe, Fred Tomaselli and many more.

A survey of the use of collage in the visual arts from the early-20th-century innovations of Picasso to the present day. Collage is defined broadly, and the book covers montage, photomontage and assemblage as associated disciplines. The geographical scope is inclusive, and there is discussion of work from Central and Eastern Europe. There is a good balance of better and lesser known artists, and the book contains a lot of material rarely reproduced.

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was a self-taught yet highly sophisticated artist who is celebrated for his pioneering achievement in collage, assemblage, and film. Cornell’s lyrical compositions combine found materials in ways that reflect a very personal exploration of art and culture and that represent his belief in art as an uplifting voyage into the imagination. This stunning book is published to accompany the first retrospective of the artist’s work in twenty-six years. In her essay, Cornell scholar Lynda Roscoe Hartigan focuses on the seminal experiences and concepts that shaped Cornell’s evolution as an American artist with a singular style of seeing. His transformation of found materials, distillation of far-flung ideas and traditions, and mingling of the vernacular and the erudite resonate with the spirit of synthetic innovation associated with American art and culture. Additionally, eight thematic sections--Navigating a Career, Cabinets of Curiosity, Dream Machines, Bouquets of Homage, Nature’s Theater, Geographies of the Heavens, Crystal Cages, and Chambers of Time--explore the major ideas that recur in his work. The book also includes a bibliography, numerous illustrations of the artist’s source material and previously unpublished works, and much more.

Trash, garbage, rubbish, dross, and detritus - in this enjoyably radical exploration of 'Junk', Gillian Whiteley rethinks art's historical and present appropriation of junk within our eco-conscious and globalised culture. She does this through an illustrated exploration of particular materials, key moments and locations and the telling of a panoply of trash narratives. Found and ephemeral materials are primarily associated with assemblage - object-based practices which emerged in the mid-1950s and culminated in the seminal exhibition 'The Art of Assemblage' in New York in 1961. With its deployment of the discarded and the filthy, Whiteley argues, assemblage has been viewed as a disruptive, transgressive artform that engaged with narratives of social and political dissent, often in the face of modernist condemnation as worthless kitsch. In the Sixties, parallel techniques flourished in Western Europe, the US and Australia but the idiom of assemblage and the re-use of found materials and objects - with artist as bricoleur - is just as prevalent now. This is a timely book that uncovers the etymology of waste and the cultures of disposability within these economies of wealth.

This volume reveals a major trend taking place today in visual and material culturethe radical appropriation of consumer goods as raw material for art- and object-making. A growing number of artists, craftspeople, and designers are realigning traditional craft practices with already manufactured objects and materials to marry the uniquely handmade with the uniformly mass-produced. Published to coincide with a show at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon,Manufactured offers an arresting look at the new crossover of craft, art, and design, and an exciting new cultural genre.