A segment of early-Sixties assemblage art was deliberately distressing, evoking horror and nuclear dread

Evidence

Indeed, Seitz might well have been thinking of Lurie and Oldenburg (name-checked in the catalog) when he described certain artists who rather than approaching a “vernacular repertoire” (hot rods, mescaline, faded flowers, pinups, trash, juke boxes, hydrogen explosions were his examples) in a “mystical” or aesthetic manner were rather “fearfully dark, evoking horror or nausea, the anguish of the scrap heap; the images of charred bodies that keep Hiroshima and Nagasaki before our eyes.” (In a word, “No!art.”) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 221

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the “No!art” tendency within assemblage and its deliberate affect of horror/nausea.