Grass skirt and coconut bra = assemblage? Hmmmm….I think not.
So, you may be sitting around wondering: What is the earliest example of assemblage or found objects in art? Maybe you’re not wondering that… it might be just me pondering those kinds of things. In any event, the answer to this lies in how you want to interpret the phrase ‘assemblage.’ The idea with assemblage is that an artist found objects that once had a particular function and then, after being discarded, they are utilized as a medium in a work of art. A transformation of something’s function and purpose. But wait a second, surely using an old iron as a shrine is an example, but what about a coconut shell bikini top? The shell had a function as a coconut, and now it’s a bikini top. A step further, you could say a basket made of grapevines is assemblage… or even further, that a painting on canvas is assemblage because the threads that make up a canvas came from the cotton plant. Well, after a while, you end up with the argument that everything is assemblage because everything came from something else, and while I agree with that from the standpoint of assemblage being a metaphor for the transformation inherent in the universe, that’s really how I view it. For me, I use the term to refer to ‘manmade’ items that are then repurposed.
Early 20th Century Assemblage aka Readymades by, Man Ray (left) and Marcel Duchamp(right)
So, back to the question, what was the earliest example of assemblage? Some say it is the works of Braque and Picasso in the early 1900s or perhaps Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ from around the same time. And though I don’t disagree that these are great examples of the beginning of assemblage and found objects being used in art… I think architecture had been using this process for centuries and centuries.
St. Donatus Zadar, Croatia
Spolia is the term used for the process of assemblage in architecture. The word’s etymology gives a hint as to how this was implemented… spolia means ‘spoils’ or ‘booty.’ It was the process of using art and architecture that had been demolished and using the remnants in new constructions. Sometimes this was pragmatic… why build a totally new column when you have a perfectly sound Roman column? Other times it was financial for much the same reason; after all, material like marble was cheap. Thus you get structures that are a little bit of this and a little bit of that. If you’ve ever been to Seville, Spain, a great example of that is the Giralda tower, which was originally constructed as a minaret during Islamic rule and then when Christians came to power it was modified, but still kept some of the original designs. Personally, I always find it fascinating when you have these styles intermingling.
“Portrait of Four Tetrarch” Venice, Italy. Plundered by Venetians in Constantinople in 1204 AD during the 4th Crusade and brought to Venice. A “neener neener” move if I ever saw one.
Another reason that spolia was used was psychological. Sometimes a culture wanted to taunt the previous culture, and by using bits and pieces of the previous regime’s structures, it was a way of saying ‘neener neener, you lost and we won.’ I remember, a jillion years ago, I was in a little village near Oaxaca and I noticed that the church had stones carved built into the exterior that were quite obviously from some pre-Hispanic structure. One carving was of a Zapotec eagle (if I remember correctly it was toward the top and it had bees flying in and out of a small crack… subsequently I was stung… but that’s another tale worthy of a blog post). A slight variation of the psychological use of spolia, especially in the case of religious sites, is that it was sometimes used as a way of coaxing the conquered into worshipping the ‘new’ gods. A conquering belief system might not seem so foreign if the old gods are present.
The thing is, there could be a variety of reasons spolia was used. It could be all or some of the previous reasons. In fact, it could be because something looked cool, so it was added in a wall or structure, though typically the ‘looked cool’ reason is less documented.
So next time you’re traveling in a land with a long history of variant empires, keep your eyes open. More likely than not, you’re surrounded by early examples of assemblage.