Junk Art

also: Trash art · Junk sculpture

technique c. 1955-present (peak 1960s-1970s) United States Europe

Junk art takes the stuff of the scrap heap - crushed car bodies, scrap metal, broken furniture, the debris of consumer society - and assembles it into sculpture. Growing out of Duchamp's readymades, Dada assemblage, and Picasso's welded iron, it emerged in the 1950s and was named the following decade, when exhibitions such as The Art of Assemblage (1961) legitimized non-art materials. Its practitioners spanned the United States and Europe: John Chamberlain's compressed automobile steel, César's crushed-car compressions, Edward Kienholz's junk-filled tableaux, and Robert Rauschenberg's Combines. What unites them is less a look than a wager - that refuse carries the texture of the life that used it, and that the ugly, battered, and disposable can hold monumentality. The label later expanded into 'trash art', with an ecological and social edge that keeps it alive today.

Des souteneurs encore dans la force de l'âge et le ventre dans l'herbe boivent de l'absinthe, Rideau de fiacre, avant 1897
Des souteneurs encore dans la force de l'âge et le ventre dans l'herbe boivent de l'absinthe, Rideau de fiacre, avant 1897CC BY-SA 4.0 (credit: Wikinizan12) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Built from discarded, salvaged, or second-hand materials
  • Assemblage construction: welding, bolting, and piling rather than carving or modeling
  • Rust, dents, peeling paint, and wear left visible as surface and texture
  • Monumental presence made from worthless matter - value inverted
  • Urban and industrial debris, especially car bodies and machinery, as raw material
  • A narrative or social charge carried by the objects' former lives

Key figures

  • John Chamberlain (1927-2011) — Sculptor of crushed automobile steel, the medium's defining figure
  • César Baldaccini (1921-1998) — French sculptor whose compressions crushed cars and scrap into block-like forms
  • Edward Kienholz (1927-1994) — Builder of life-size tableaux assembled from junk, furniture, and found debris
  • Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) — Combines fused discarded objects with painting, opening the way for junk art

Example works

  • Back Seat Dodge '38 — Edward Kienholz (1964)
  • Monogram — Robert Rauschenberg (1955-1959)

Sources

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