Small Opera
One of many artists to have attended John Cage’s experimental music classes at the New School for Social Research in the mid-1950s, Hansen operated at the intersection of many different experimental art movements, including Fluxus, Happenings, Neo-Dada, and Pop. He is best-known today for assemblages and collages like this one, composed of found materials—mostly trash—scavenged from the streets of New York. Small Opera consists of dozens of pieces of paper torn from Hershey chocolate wrappers and pasted to a board. Some of the pieces bear printed words, including "she" and "her" as well as printed letters that Hansen recombined to created words not found on the original wrappers. The distribution of the terms is irregular and asymmetrical. They do not form a sentence, either structurally or conceptually. Despite their incoherence, however, the phrases still communicate, albeit indirectly. "Sad," "no," "uh oh," and "kill": together these evoke anxiety, trepidation, and threat.
Artwork Details
- Title: Small Opera
- Artist: Al Hansen (American, New York 1927–1995 Cologne)
- Date: 1964
- Medium: Torn and pasted printed paper on particle board
- Dimensions: 3 3/8 × 2 3/4 in. (8.6 × 7 cm)
- Classification: Collages
- Credit Line: Gift of Kay Bearman, 2016
- Object Number: 2016.716.2
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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