Objet trouvè, Ready Made, Assemblages

The first artistic works being created by using and recycling objects were those by the Surrealists and Dadaists. Among them: Duchamp, Cornell and Picasso himself and, after the war, the New Dada current. The Ready Made was invented by Duchamp in 1913 and became later the turning point of conceptual search in the sixties with the Pop Art. Ready Made means already prepared, and as such it has a consonance with the Objet Trouvé: both become works of art at the very instant they are assigned to an artistic scenery. Important, for Duchamp, is that the operation of estranging and depriving the object of its functionality may enable the public to think of a common object as a work of art. Assemblage is also a French term: assembly, this meaning works put together with nonhomogeneous objects; the assemblage process is often similar to the collage technique, though it is always tridimensional. This technique used by the Surrealists and Dadaists was then adopted by the Pop Art: the installations of the seventies are derived from assemblage.