Assemblage,Bricolage, and the Practice of Everyday Life

Certain art-historical terms, the French artist Jean Dubuffet explained to William Seitz in 1961, are determined by a period- and context-specific “spirit” or “mood.”1 While Dubuffet was in fact discussing the example of collage, it is tempting to apply his insight to Seitz's 1961 Art of Assemblage exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which marked, in many ways, the simultaneous culmination and demise of a specific spirit of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The word “assemblage” itself would be quickly superseded—by the end of the decade—by new terms such as environment, performance, and Conceptual art, and this moment in the history of twentieth-century art remains to this day largely eclipsed by these subsequent developments.