objet trouvé

objet trouvé (French: found object). An object found by an artist and displayed with no, or minimal, alteration as (or as an element in) a work of art. It may be a natural object, such as a pebble, a shell, or a curiously contorted branch, or a man-made object such as a piece of pottery or old piece of ironwork or machinery. The essence of the matter is that the finder-artist recognizes such a chance find as an ‘aesthetic object’ and displays it for appreciation by others as he would a work of art. The practice began with the Dadaists (especially Marcel Duchamp) and was particularly cultivated by the Surrealists. George Heard Hamilton writes that the devotees of the objet trouvé believed that such pieces ‘by their unexpected isolation from their customary purpose and environment could open magic casements on interior psychic seas … But the technique was easily abused, especially by interior decorators, until no bit of driftwood or broken bone was free from Surrealist implications.’ Subsequently, found material has been much used in assemblage.

Although the objet trouvé is considered a 20th-century phenomenon, the zoologist (and Surrealist painter) Desmond Morris (1928– ) thinks that the earliest known art object in the world comes into this class. It is the three-million-year-old Makapansgat Pebble (University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg), discovered in the Transvaal in 1925. ‘Investigations revealed that it could not have come from the cave where it was found and must have been carried from a location about three miles away. What made it special was that it had the shape of a human skull, on one side of which were small cavities that looked like a pair of sunken eye-sockets above a simple mouth. There is no suggestion that this “face” had been artificially manufactured but its accidental resemblance is so striking that it seems certain the object was collected and brought back to a favoured dwelling place as a “treasured possession” … the cave where it was discovered was not occupied by prehistoric man but by the early man-apes known as Australopithecines’ (The Human Animal, 1994).