Found art - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The term found art—more commonly found object or readymade—describes art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

created from undisguised, but often modified, objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function. Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

was the originator of this in the early 20th century.

Found art derives its identity as art from the designation placed upon it by the artist. The context into which it is placed (e.g. a gallery or museum) is usually also a highly relevant factor. The idea of dignifying commonplace objects in this way was originally a shocking challenge to the accepted distinction between what was considered art as opposed to not art. Although it may now be accepted in the art world as a viable practice, it continues to arouse questioning, as with the Tate Gallery

Tate Gallery

The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...

's Turner Prize

Turner Prize

The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...

exhibition of Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin

Tracey Karima Emin RA is a British artist of English and Turkish Cypriot origin. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs ....

's My Bed
My Bed
My Bed is a work by the British artist Tracey Emin. First created in 1998, it was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1999 as one of the shortlisted works for the Turner Prize. It consisted of her bed with bedroom objects in an abject state, and gained much media attention...

, which consisted literally of her unmade and dishevelled bed. In this sense the artist gives the audience time and a stage to contemplate an object. Appreciation of found art in this way can prompt philosophical reflection in the observer.

Found art, however, has to have the artist's input, at the very least an idea about it, i.e. the artist's designation of the object as art, which is nearly always reinforced with a title. There is mostly also some degree of modification of the object, although not to the extent that it cannot be recognised. The modification may lead to it being designated a "modified", "interpreted" or "adapted" found object.

Origin: Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

coined the term readymade in 1915 to describe his found art. Duchamp assembled the first readymade, entitled Bicycle Wheel
Bicycle Wheel
Bicycle Wheel is a readymade by Marcel Duchamp consisting of a bicycle fork with front wheel mounted upside-down on a wooden stool.In 1913 at his Paris studio he mounted the bicycle wheel upside down onto a stool, spinning it occasionally just to watch it. Later he denied that its creation was...

in 1913, the same time as his Nude Descending a Staircase
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
-External links:* at the Philadelphia Museum of Art* from Life magazine...

was attracting the attention of critics at the International Exhibition of Modern Art

Armory Show

Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors...

. His Fountain
Fountain (Duchamp)
Fountain is a 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp. It is one of the pieces which he called readymades. In such pieces he made use of an already existing object. In this case Duchamp used a urinal, which he titled Fountain and signed "R. Mutt". Readymades also go by the term Found object...

, a urinal which he signed with the pseudonym "R. Mutt", confounded the art world in 1917. His Bottle Rack
Bottle Rack
The Bottle Rack is an artwork created in 1914 by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp labeled the piece a "readymade", a term he used to describe his collection of ordinary, manufactured objects not commonly associated with art...

is a bottle drying rack signed by Duchamp, and is considered to be the first "pure" readymade.

Research by Rhonda Roland Shearer

Rhonda Roland Shearer

Rhonda Roland Shearer is an American sculptor, scholar and journalist, who founded the nonprofit organization Art Science Research Laboratory with her late husband Stephen Jay Gould. The mission statement avows that the lab aims to "infuse intellectual rigor and critical thinking in disciplines...

indicates that Duchamp may have fabricated his found objects. Exhaustive research of mundane items like snow shovels and bottle racks in use at the time failed to reveal identical matches. The urinal, upon close inspection, is non-functional. However, there are accounts of Walter Arensberg

Walter Arensberg

Walter Conrad Arensberg was an American art collector, critic and poet. His father was part owner and president of a crucible steel company. He majored in English and philosophy at Harvard University...

and Joseph Stella

Joseph Stella

Joseph Stella was an Italian-born, American Futurist painter best known for his depictions of industrial America. He is associated with the American Precisionism movement of the 1910s-1940s....

being with Duchamp when he purchased the original Fountain at J. L. Mott Iron Works.

Development

The use of found objects was quickly taken up by the Dada

Dada

Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...

movement, being used by Man Ray

Man Ray

Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...

and Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia was a French painter, poet, and typographist, associated with both the Dada and Surrealist art movements.- Early life :...

who combined it with traditional art by sticking combs onto a painting to represent hair. http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=21640&searchid=8483 A well-known work by Man Ray is Gift (1921), http://www.manray-photo.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=30&products_id=157&osCsid=d49650ee1a772ead1f06e8b878e83e9a which is an iron with nails sticking out from its flat underside, thus rendering it useless.

The combination of several found objects is a type of readymade sometimes known as an assemblage

Assemblage (art)

Assemblage is an artistic process. In the visual arts, it consists of making three-dimensional or two-dimensional artistic compositions by putting together found objects...

. Another such example is Marcel Duchamp's Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?, consisting of a small birdcage containing a thermometer, cuttlebone, and 151 marble cubes resembling sugar cubes.

By the time of the Surrealist

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

Exhibition of Objects in 1936 a whole range of sub-classifications had been devised — including found objects, readymade objects, perturbed objects, mathematical objects, natural objects, interpreted natural objects, incorporated natural objects, Oceanic objects, American objects and Surrealist objects. At this time Surrealist leader, André Breton

André Breton

André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....

, defined readymades as "manufactured objects raised to the dignity of works of art through the choice of the artist."

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

used found objects as the basis for Baboon and Young, and joined a "bicycle saddle" with "handle bars" to make a bull's head.

In the 1960s found objects were present in both the Fluxus

Fluxus

Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...

movement and in Pop art

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

. Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...

exhibited modified found objects, such as rocks with a hole in them stuffed with fur and fat, a van with sledges trailing behind it, and a rusty girder.

In 1973 Michael Craig Martin claimed of his work An Oak Tree

An Oak Tree

An Oak Tree is a conceptual work of art created by Michael Craig-Martin RA in 1973. The piece consists of two units; an object, a glass of water on a glass shelf, and a text...

, "It's not a symbol. I have changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree. I didn't change its appearance. The actual oak tree is physically present, but in the form of a glass of water."

Commodity sculpture

In the 1980s, a variation of found art emerged called commodity sculpture where commercially mass-produced items would be arranged in the art gallery as sculpture. The focus of this variety of sculpture was on the marketing, display of products. These artists included Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons

Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....

, Haim Steinbach

Haim Steinbach

Haim Steinbach is an [American] artist, who lives in New York City. Many of his works consist of arrangements of mass produced objects or readymades.-Life and work:...

, and Ashley Bickerton

Ashley Bickerton

Ashley Bickerton is a contemporary artist living in Bali. A mixed-media artist, Bickerton often combines both photographic and painterly elements with industrial and found object assemblages...

(who later moved on to do other kinds of work).

One of Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons

Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....

' early signature works was Two Ball 50/50 Tank, 1985, which consisted of two basketballs floating in water, which half-fills a glass tank (an influence on Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst

Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...

Trash art

A specific sub-genre of found art is known as trash art or junk art. These works are primarily comprised from components that have been discarded. Often they come quite literally from the trash. Many organizations sponsor junk art competitions.

Creating and using trash art can expose people to hazardous substances. For instance, older computer and electronic components can contain lead (in solder and insulation). Jewelry made from these items may require careful handling.
In France, trash art became known as " Poubellisme", art made from contents of " poubelles" ( trash bins)

Contemporary

Throughout the 1990s, the Young British Artists

Young British Artists

Young British Artists or YBAs is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988...

(YBAs) made extensive use of found "objects", often with very strong press reaction. Damien Hirst exhibited a shark preserved in formaldehyde in a glass tank and called it The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is an artwork created in 1991 by Damien Hirst, an English artist and a leading member of the "Young British Artists" . It consists of a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine. It was originally commissioned in 1991 by...

. He has taken this to extremes by presenting in the same way a cow and calf cut into sections, and, in A Thousand Years, a rotting cow's head, maggots and flies. Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin

Tracey Karima Emin RA is a British artist of English and Turkish Cypriot origin. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs ....

exhibited a tent covered with appliquéd names, titled Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, and then her own unmade bed with sweat-stained sheets, surrounded by items such as her slippers, period-stained underwear and drink bottles, titled My Bed
My Bed
My Bed is a work by the British artist Tracey Emin. First created in 1998, it was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1999 as one of the shortlisted works for the Turner Prize. It consisted of her bed with bedroom objects in an abject state, and gained much media attention...

. Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged during the 1990s...

enlarged to a giant size a lurid tabloid press cutting; she also exhibited a mattress with two melons, a bucket and a cucumber, representing female and male genitalia.

Found art can also occur on the internet, where an image found on the internet can become the core component of a larger artwork made by modifying the image through basic computer graphic tools.

Historical precedents

Gold, when used in art, as in Medieval altar pieces, is present for its own innate quality, and is therefore a found object, as are precious jewels used in artworks. The essential difference is that these materials were already considered precious, whereas modern art's use of found objects has mostly been of mundane items, which are then deemed to be elevated into a special status.

An exception in 2003 was the Chapman Brothers

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Iakovos "Jake" Chapman and Konstantinos "Dinos" Chapman are English visual artists, often known as the Chapman Brothers, who work together as a collaborative sibling duo...

use of a set of Francisco Goya

Francisco Goya

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown, and through his works was both a commentator on and chronicler of his era...

prints, The Disasters of War
The Disasters of War
The Disasters of War are a series of 8280 prints in the first published edition , for which the last two plates were not available. See "Execution". prints created between 1810 and 1820 by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya...

, which they "adapted" by collaging clown and puppy faces onto the figures. The prints were valuable already in their own right as art.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2003/04/30/bachap30.xml

Like Marcel Duchamp before him, Damien Hirst has suggested that a painting can be considered an adapted found object (the object being paint), i.e. the whole history of art is based on the found objects.

In the 19th century, the French writer Comte de Lautréamont

Comte de Lautréamont

Comte de Lautréamont was the pseudonym of Isidore Lucien Ducasse , an Uruguayan-born French poet....

had drawn attention to the possibilities of transforming the otherwise mundane object with the now famous phrase, "Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table."

Criticism

The modern use of found objects aroused hostility from the start, when Duchamp's urinal, titled Fountain
Fountain (Duchamp)
Fountain is a 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp. It is one of the pieces which he called readymades. In such pieces he made use of an already existing object. In this case Duchamp used a urinal, which he titled Fountain and signed "R. Mutt". Readymades also go by the term Found object...

, was rejected by the "unjuried" 1917 Society of Independent Artists

Society of Independent Artists

Society of Independent Artists was an association of American artists founded in 1916 and based in New York.Based on the French Société des Artistes Indépendants, the goal of the society was to hold annual exhibitions by avant-garde artists. Exhibitions were to be open to anyone who wanted to...

on the basis that it was not art.

The found object in art has been a subject of polarised debate in Britain throughout the 1990s due to the use of it by the Young British Artists

Young British Artists

Young British Artists or YBAs is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988...

. It has been rejected by the general public and journalists, and supported by public museums and art critics. In his 2000 Dimbleby lecture, Who's afraid of modern art, Sir Nicholas Serota

Nicholas Serota

Sir Nicholas Andrew Serota is a British art curator. Serota was director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, before becoming director of the Tate, the United Kingdom's national gallery of modern and British art in 1988. He was awarded a knighthood in 1999. He...

advocated such kinds of "difficult" art, while quoting opposition such as the Daily Mail

Daily Mail

The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...

headline "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all". A more unexpected rejection in 1999 came from artists—some of whom had previously worked with found objects—who founded the Stuckists

Stuckism

Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art...

group and issued a manifesto denouncing such work in favour of a return to painting with the statement "Ready-made art is a polemic of materialism". http://www.stuckism.com/stuckistmanifesto.html#manifest

Other art forms

"Other People's Mail", was a zine

Zine

A zine is most commonly a small circulation publication of original or appropriated texts and images. More broadly, the term encompasses any self-published work of minority interest usually reproduced via photocopier....

first published in 1995 by Abby Bridge. The photocopied publication contained found documents including: "lists found in the pockets of thrift-store clothes, notes passed in coffee shops or left on windshields, school work left in textbooks, postcards and photos from junk stores, letters left at bus stops, rants posted on power boxes, writings left in photocopiers, and so on.". It was resurrected on openletters.com in 2000 and also inspired an episode of This American Life

This American Life

This American Life is a weekly hour-long radio program produced by WBEZ and hosted by Ira Glass. It is distributed by Public Radio International on PRI affiliate stations and is also available as a free weekly podcast. Primarily a journalistic non-fiction program, it has also featured essays,...

. Found Magazine
Found Magazine
Found Magazine, created by Davy Rothbart and Jason Bitner and based in Ann Arbor, Michigan and New York City, collects and catalogs found notes, photos, and other interesting items, publishing them in an irregularly-issued magazine, in books, and on its website...

, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census places the population at 113,934, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 344,791 as of 2010...

, first published in 2004, collects and catalogs found notes, photos, and other "interesting" items. Music composers use found sound in their compositions. Examples include John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

, Nicolas Collins

Nicolas Collins

Nicolas Collins is a composer of mostly electronic music and former student of Alvin Lucier. He received a B.A. and M.A...

, Art of Noise, The Slant (band)

The Slant (band)

-The Slant :The Slant was an experimental, psychedelic, indie,alternative, folk/rock music group based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The group has received favorable reviews from National Public Radio and various other media outlets. The Slant used...

, Robin Rimbaud

Robin Rimbaud

Robin Rimbaud is an electronic musician who works under the name Scanner due to his use of cell phone and police scanners in live performance...

AKA Scanner and The Books

The Books

The Books are an American duo, formed in New York City in 1999, consisting of guitarist and vocalist Nick Zammuto and cellist Paul de Jong. Their releases typically incorporate samples of obscure sounds and speech...

. In British experimental music, Christopher Hobbs

Christopher Hobbs

Christopher Hobbs is an English experimental composer, best known as a pioneer of British Systems music.-Life and career:...

was the foremost proponent of the 'musical readymade', a concept named by John White

John White (composer)

John White is an English composer and musical performer.-Life:White trained and taught at the London Royal College of Music...

. Hobbs used chance operations, systems

Systems music

Systems music is a term which has been used to describe the work of composers who concern themselves primarily with sound continuums which evolve gradually, often over very long periods of time . Historically, the American minimalists Steve Reich, La Monte Young and Philip Glass are considered the...

and other 'dislocating procedures' on works by Tchaikovsky, John Bull, Bach, and others to create new pieces, including using a readymade or 'found' system (a knitting pattern for an Aran sweater

Aran sweater

The Aran sweater is a style of jumper/sweater that takes its name from the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. It is sometimes known as a fisherman sweater...

) to create Aran (1972). Writers Brion Gysin

Brion Gysin

Brion Gysin was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs...

and William Burroughs pioneered "cut ups", which was the random assembling of cut-up pre-existing text. This has also been employed by David Bowie

David Bowie

David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s...

, Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain

Kurt Donald Cobain was an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the grunge band Nirvana...

, Ted Milton

Ted Milton

Ted Milton is an English poet and musician, best known for leading the Blurt, an experimental jazz-rock group.Milton grew up in Africa, Canada and Great Britain. He published some early poems in magazines like Paris Review...

and Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke

Thomas "Thom" Edward Yorke is an English musician who is the lead vocalist and principal songwriter for Radiohead. He mainly plays guitar and piano, but he has also played drums and bass guitar...

for lyric writing. Poets, too, create art out of non-literary writing, such as vocabulary books, adverts or newspaper articles. Adrian Henri

Adrian Henri

Adrian Henri was a British poet and painter best remembered as the founder of poetry-rock group The Liverpool Scene and as one of three poets in the best-selling anthology The Mersey Sound, along with Brian Patten and Roger McGough. The trio of Liverpool poets came to prominence in that city's...

made the poem On the Late Late Massachers Stillbirths and Deformed Children a Smoother Lovelier Skin Job (and the title) by combining found text from John Milton's "Sonnet XVIII", the TV Times
TV Times
TVTimes is a television listings magazine published in the United Kingdom by IPC Media, a subsidiary of Time Warner. It is known for its access to television actors and their programmes. In 2006 it was refreshed for a more modern look, increasing its emphasis on big star interviews and soaps...

and a CND leaflet. Cordelia McGuire turned a funeral home classified advertisement into a poem entitled Embalmer by adding line breaks. Found art features in Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

-Life and career:Jean-Pierre Jeunet was born in Roanne, Loire, France. He bought his first camera at the age of 17 and made short films while studying animation at Cinémation Studios. He befriended Marc Caro, a designer and comic book artist who became his longtime collaborator and...

's film Amélie
Amélie
Amélie is a 2001 romantic comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Written by Jeunet with Guillaume Laurant, the film is a whimsical depiction of contemporary Parisian life, set in Montmartre...

and the 2001 independent

Independent film

An independent film, or indie film, is a professional film production resulting in a feature film that is produced mostly or completely outside of the major film studio system. In addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment companies, independent films are also produced...

comedy, Ghost World
Ghost World (film)
Ghost World is a 2001 comedy-drama film directed by Terry Zwigoff, based on the comic book of the same name and screenplay by Daniel Clowes...

.

Artists

Many modern artists have used found objects in their art. These include:

Gustavo Aguerre
Gustavo Aguerre
Gustavo Aguerre, born 1953 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, artist, photographer, curator, writer, theatre designer. After leaving Argentina he moved to Germany studying at the Munich Art Academy between 1974 and 1976....
Arman
Arman
Arman was a French-born American artist. Born Armand Pierre Fernandez in Nice, France, Arman is a painter who moved from using the objects as paintbrushes to using them as the painting itself...
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...
Guillaume Bijl
Guillaume Bijl
Guillaume Bijl, born in Antwerp in 1946, is a Belgian installation artist.Bijl's first installation was a driving school, set in a gallery-space in Antwerp in 1979, accompanied by a manifesto calling for the abolition of art centres, and replacing them with 'socially useful institutions'...
George Brecht
George Brecht
George Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Iakovos "Jake" Chapman and Konstantinos "Dinos" Chapman are English visual artists, often known as the Chapman Brothers, who work together as a collaborative sibling duo...
Greg Colson
Greg Colson
Greg Colson is an American artist best known for wall sculptures constructed of salvaged materials. Colson has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including Sperone Westwater , William Griffin Gallery , Galleria Cardi , Kunsthalle Lophem , Konrad Fischer , and the Lannan...
Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornell was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage...
Tony Cragg
Tony Cragg
Tony Cragg is a British visual artist specialized in sculpture. He is currently the director of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.-Early life:Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949...
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
Mark Divo
Mark Divo
Mark Divo is a Luxembourgeois conceptual artist and curator who organises large scale interactive art projects incorporating the work of a number of well-known underground artists. His own work involves performance, photography, installation, often using found material.-Career:Between 1988 and...
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin
Tracey Karima Emin RA is a British artist of English and Turkish Cypriot origin. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs ....
Tom Friedman
Tom Friedman (artist)
Tom Friedman American conceptual sculptor known for his work employing everyday material, such as toothpicks or sugar cubes in intricate geometric arrangements. Friedman was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Washington University in St. Louis, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts in graphic...
Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...
Lonnie Holley
Lonnie Holley
Lonnie Bradley Holley, sometimes known as The Sand Man , is an African American artist and art educator....
Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....
Matthieu Laurette
Matthieu Laurette
Matthieu Laurette is a media and conceptual contemporary French artist who works in a variety of media, from TV and video to installation and public interventions....
Lennie Lee
Lennie Lee
Lennie Lee is a South African conceptual artist who lives and works in London.-Life and career:Lennie Lee is a British artist born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He moved to the UK in 1960. He was educated at Dulwich college in London before winning a scholarship to study philosophy at Christ...
John Lefelhocz
John Lefelhocz
John Lefelhocz is an American conceptual artist primarily known for his works in the textile arts, specifically quilts. He attended Ohio University . Since college, he has owned and operated Cycle Path Bicycle Shop in Athens while establishing himself as an artist...
Sarah Lucas
Sarah Lucas
Sarah Lucas is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged during the 1990s...
David Mach
David Mach
David Mach is a Scottish sculptor and installation artist.Mach's artistic style is based on flowing assemblages of mass-produced found art objects. Typically these include magazines,vicious teddy bears,newspapers, car tyres, match sticks and coat hangers...
Michael Craig Martin
Rodney McMillian
Rodney McMillian
Rodney McMillian is an artist based in Los Angeles.McMillian holds a BA in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia...
Louise Nevelson
Cornelia Parker
Cornelia Parker
Cornelia Ann Parker OBE, RA is an English sculptor and installation artist. -Life and career:Parker studied at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design and Wolverhampton Polytechnic...
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....
Niki de Saint Phalle
Niki de Saint Phalle
Niki de Saint Phalle, born Catherine-Marie-Agnès-Brandon Fal de Saint Phalle was a French sculptor, painter, and film maker.-The early years:...
Giuseppe Penone
Giuseppe Penone
Giuseppe Penone is an Italian artist. Penone started working professionally in 1968 in the Garessio forest, near where he was born. He is the younger member of the Italian movement named "Arte Povera", this term has been coined by Germano Celant. Penone's work is concerned with establishing a...
Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia was a French painter, poet, and typographist, associated with both the Dada and Surrealist art movements.- Early life :...
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
Man Ray
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
Joe Rush
Joe Rush
Joe Rush influenced by the film 'Mad Max' and 'Judge Dredd' comics, was the co-originator of the travelling multi media art group Eat my face, an underground art collective who specialised in building large scale installations out of waste material...
Leo Sewell
Leo Sewell
Leo Sewell is an American "found object" artist. His assemblages of recycled material are in over 40 museums and in private collections worldwide.Sewell was born in Annapolis, Maryland and moved to Philadelphia in 1974...
Tom Shelton
Jessamine Shumate
Jessamine Shumate
Ada Jessamine Shumate was born on March 31, 1902 as Ada Jessamine White in Horsepasture, Virginia and is an American Artist winner of the "Award of Distinction" in 1955 from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She was a noted artist, historian and cartographer in Henry County...
Daniel Spoerri
Daniel Spoerri
Daniel Spoerri is a Swiss artist and writer born in Romania, who has been called "the central figure of European post-war art" and "one of the most renown[ed] [artists] of the 20th century." Spoerri is best known for his "snare-pictures," a type of assemblage or object art, in which he captures...
Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...
Michelle Stitzlein
Michelle Stitzlein
Michelle Stitzlein is an American artist who creates found object art / sculpture from recycled materials. She received a BFA in 1989 from the Columbus College of Art and Design . She and her husband Nathaniel Stitzlein founded Art Grange Studios in Baltimore, Ohio...
Tomoko Takahashi
Tomoko Takahashi
Tomoko Takahashi is a Japanese artist born in Tokyo in 1966 and based in London, UK. She studied at Tama University, Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Fine Art. She first came to attention when she won the EAST award at EASTinternational in 1997...
Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell was a German painter, sculptor, noise music maker and Happening artist of the second half of the 20th century. Wolf Vostell is considered one of the pioneers of video art, environment-sculptures, Happenings and the Fluxus Movement...
Tolleck Winner
Tolleck Winner
Tolleck Winner is a UK-based sculptor. Born 30 July 1959 in the former Soviet Union, he has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1980.He works in a variety of media and is an Associate member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors....
Isaiah Zagar
Isaiah Zagar
Isaiah Zagar is a Philadelphia mosaic artist. He is notable for his murals which are primarily in or around Philadelphia's South Street.-Early life:Zagar received his Bachelor of Art from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York City...

External links

Betacourt, Michael: "The Richard Mutt Case: Looking for Marcel Duchamp's Fountain"
Thompson, Charles: "A Stuckist on Stuckism" (See section "The medium modifies the message")
den Arend, Lucien: "Environmental Art and Land Art as objet trouvé"
Iverson, Margaret: "Readymade, found object, photograph" - An extended examination of the subject
www.culturalreuse.org Cultural ReUse Research Collaborative, Found Object Project
"FAUND" paper magazine featuring internet image finders.
"READYMADE" fan scarf remix knitting pattern by Schalalala
http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=112
http://www.artreview.com/group/artoffoundobjectsrepurposedmaterials

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