Strategies of excess: The postwar assemblages of Alberto Burri, Robert Rauschenberg, and Arman (Italy)

This dissertation examines the postwar assemblage art movement as it developed within international capitalism from 1950 to 1965. Although postwar assemblage was celebrated in museum surveys as early as 1961, scholars have yet to situate this found-object art in relation to its international socio-economic context. An analysis of artworks by Alberto Burri in Rome in the early 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg in New York in the mid-1950s, and Arman (Armand Fernandez) in Paris in the early 1960s reveals the historically specific development of the practice in relation to the postwar economy's international markets and attendant consumer culture. This dissertation proposes that these artists used assemblage strategically to engage with a culture of abundance and excess---its consumer goods, trash, and surplus, as well as its new distribution and mass-marketing systems. Through Allan Kaprow's early thinking about assemblage as an open and changeable form extending into its environment and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's later theorization of capitalism as an analogous open form, the introduction argues that assemblage art intervened directly and materially with the flows of capitalist excess. The next chapter looks specifically at the way Burri "sutured" the trash of burlap sacks into modernist grids, both exposing and containing U.S. Marshall Plan food aid packaging in the early 1950s. Continuing with an investigation of Rauschenberg in a burgeoning mass-market culture centered in New York, the dissertation shows how his Combines produced the late fifties spectator as a consumer, "assembled" as an amalgamation of everyday objects. The last chapter argues that Arman's Accumulations (glass vitrines filled with commercial items) performed a systematic sociology by repetitively enacting consumption and its "spectacularization" of the 1960s subject. These three strategies: suturing (Burri), assembling (Rauschenberg), and systematizing (Arman) represent an arc in the development of postwar assemblage art. A burgeoning international consumer economy was first denied by Burri, assembled and articulated by Rauschenberg, and then fully integrated into a system by Arman. This trajectory elaborates how artists and viewers became subjects of capitalist abundance and how assemblages strategically reversed and deferred the mechanisms of postwar capitalism, but always operated within its structure.