●An artistic and creative experience is a characteristic

of our school. It has been therefore natural to deal with the topic of recycling by making considerations on the MATERIALS used on works of art.

● We have traced the salient moments of XX century art and we have discovered how different and disused objects and common and ordinary items have been so frequently used to create something new that has become a work of art.

● This new knowledge has allowed us to look at these works as autonomous art forms to be freely interpreted. From this awareness we have had some personal ideas on this topic and have created some works.

● During the first decade of XX century the world has been marked by drastic changes. Even art has been affected by these changes; it does not have to show reality but it becomes the expression of the creativity of the artist who is totally free in the use of his expressive means.

● Expressionism, Cubism, Abstractionism, Futurism, Dadaism put forward new figurative languages and unusual materials refusing all the artistic tradition of the past. The procedures and the techniques mix together and the boundaries among different arts are fainter and fainter.

● Picasso and Braque are the first to experiment new techniques and materials as ‘collage’ and ‘papier collé’ to make some works of art.

● Collage is the tecnique of sticking together pieces of different materials such as cloths, metals and thin layers of wood and the artist works over them with his colour.

● In ‘papier-collé’ newspaper, wall paper and printed paper is put on the canvas with glue.

● These common materials gain a new value and an artistic meaning in this new context.

Natura morta con sedia impagliata

Pablo Picasso,1912. Collage, Olio e tela cerata su tela. Parigi,Museo Picasso

Le “Quotidien” violino e pipa

Georges Braque,1912. Gesso, carboncino e ritagli di carta su tela, Parigi, Musèe National d’Art Moderne

● A few years later, in 1916, Dadaism uses reclaimed materials and items taken directly from our everyday life as new forms of expression.

● Marcel Duchamp invents ready-made and presents everyday objects as museum pieces; Kurt Schwitters makes ‘assemblages’ with any kind of waste, such as cigarette ends, string, tickets and tin cans; he makes up a new term MERZBILDEN , i.e. MERZ paintings.

● In Italy Futurists, as E.Prampolini, make polymateric works. They use completely different materials ( feathers, laces and wire nettings) and these works are sometimes associated with some music.

Marcel Duchamp,1917. Ready-made: orinatorio in porcellana. Milano Galleria Schwarz .Copia da originale perduto

M Duchamp, ready-made , 1913Collezione privata

Fontana Ruota di bicicletta

Merzbild Rossfett

Kurt Schwitters,1919 assemblaggio e olio su legno, Ginevra, Centro Lussato

Polimaterico automatismo F

E.Prampolini1941 assemblaggio, Collezione privata

● Joined directly to Dadaism, the artists of the Surrealist group work in the Twenties in Paris : they make works of art starting from ordinary

and everyday items which are freely assembled and enriched by tactile components and

charged by an ironical and provocative function. ● The works by Meret Oppenheim and Salvador

Dalì change so remarkably the expressivity and the content of the original images that the

viewer is astonished.

Colazione in pelliccia

M. Oppenheim1936, New York Museum of Modern Art

Telefono aragosta

Salvador Dalì, 1938

● After WWII the artists go on working with new techniques and new materials competing with the emerging reality of mass society which bring forward disposable consumer goods as new icons.

● The artists who better interprete this peculiar aspect are the ones belonging to American and English Pop Art.

Just What is it that makes Today’s homes so different, so Appeling?

R.Hamilton, 1956,collage su carta,Londra,Tate Modern.

Roast Beaf

C.Oldenburg, 1961, stoffa,gesso, ferro, New York, collezione privata.

In particular the artists of NEW DADAISM pay attention on what quickly is used, consumed and thrown away. They are the first who try to recycle these disused and well-thumbed objects and give them a new life.They use any kind of materials or parts of discarded objects and they assemble them with their pictorial intervention creating some assemblages which remove the difference between painting and sculpture.

A famous artist is R. Rauschenberg with his combing painting tecnique.

Coca cola Plan

R.Rauschenberg , 1958, tecnica mista, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporany Art.

Bed

R.Rauschenberg 1955, legno, cuscino,coperta,colori a olio, 1955, New York, Museum Modern Art

● In Europe at the same time of American experimentation Nouveau Realism establishes itself. The artists cope with the topic of waste and make use of refuse, trying to give it a lost worthiness.

● J. Tanguely gives life to a new bicycle , Arman puts some accretions of waste under some plexiglass from where it is possible to see the reflection of the previous life of the objects, Cesar squeezes waste getting new aesthetic impressions. M. Rotella uses ‘decollages’ of layers of broken posters alluding to the speed of communication.

Tricycle

J.Tanguly , 1960, assemblaggio di materiali di recupero, Parigi, Museo Nazionale d’Arte Moderna

Poubelle I

Arman , 1960, accumulo di rifiuti sotto plexiglas, Krefeld, Kaiser Museum

Compression

Cesar, 1962, rottami di automobili compressi, Ginevra, Musèe d’Art e d’Histoire

Marylin

M.Rotella , 1962, decollage su tela, Collezione privata

● In the Sixties in Italy ‘ Arte Povera’ (Pauper art) develops. It tries to find a new relationship between art and life. The artist M. Pistoletto uses rejected materials as rags which lead to a consideration on the values of Appearance as a result of the consumer society.

● An example is the work ‘Venus of Rags’ which matches a neoclassical Venus, symbol of everlasting values, to heaps of multicoloured rags, symbol of the ephemeral modern world.

Venere degli stracci

M.Pistoletto,1967, marmo e stracci,Biella, Fondazione Pistoletto

● Between Fifties and Sixties a new international artistic movement establishes itself as a reaction to the damage left by the war on human consciences and as an answer to a general feeling of dismay: Informal art.

● An artist from our area, A. Burri, uses a tormented material and shows the general tragedy.

● He recovers jute bags which were used for basic needs. They are disused and torn and he stitches them together to give them a new existence full of memories.

● He destroys them with fire and he regenerates plastic materials, in the hope of a world which suffers from the achievements of a modernity, careless of the real needs of human beings.

Sacco 5 P

A.Burri, 1953, sacco, vinavil, stoffa su tela, Città di Castello,Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini

Rosso plastica

A.Burri, 1964, plastica combusta e acrilico su tela,città di Castello Fondazione Albizzini