Junk Art: Definition & Meaning

Throughout the 20th-century, as part of the modernist revolt against the use of traditional materials in fine art and the consequent desire to demonstrate that "art" can be made out of anything, artists have been creating sculpture, assemblage, combined paintings/sculptures and installations from an ever-widening range of unusual objects and materials. Exemplified by the 1950s work of the experimental Texan-born artist Richard Rauschenberg, the name "junk art" was first coined by the British art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway (1926-90), in 1961, to describe artworks made from scrap metal, broken-up machinery, cloth rags, timber, waste paper and other "found" materials. Traceable to early 20th-century art by Picasso, Duchamp and Schwitters, junk art has analogies in Dada, the works of Alberto Burri (1915-95) and later Arte Povera artists from Italy, Spanish artists like Antoni Tapies (b.1923), and the Californian Funk art movement. It is also seen as a sub-species of "found art", and is sometimes referred to as "trash art". Its identifying mark, however, remains the use of banal, ordinary, everyday materials.

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