Why Collage?
Exploring what it means to ‘make’ today.
The collage principle has been considered by some critics as the fundamental structural model of the twentieth century, not only in the field of aesthetics but more generally in social, scientific and philosophical thought. (Adamowicz 1998, 13)
The methodologies of collage thinking and making have become almost unconsciously embedded in modern thought — ushered in by the advent of mechanical reproduction and extended through the infinite, effortless replication of the digital age. Everyone who uses a computer understands the power of ⌘c / ⌘v; cutting and pasting have become ubiquitous physical and psychological operations.
We no longer see wholes, but an infinitude of fragments which may be excised, appropriated, reconfigured, and rearranged for rebroadcast as a personal narrative. Modern identity is a continuous edit; an act of constant selection within a feedback loop. We increasingly piece together our private- and public-selves by tracing connections within the shifting kaleidoscope of juxtapositions we are exposed to.
I am interested in the concept of the fragment, and how, as Barthes argues, fragments express the shifting, unstable nature of meaning. I am interested in how this idea can be explored through collage, which is a form of second-order production. Existing images — reduced to discrete, independent parts and then reconstructed — unlock novel associations and suggest new, wholly personal readings bred from the recombinations of memory, convention, and perception.
Collage-making is a process that introduces a break between intention and result; to make obvious the skewing lens that is the process of production. Intentionality is still present, but the author is also simultaneously the reader; the process is a buffer between intention and output.
The emergence of relations among things, more than the things themselves, always gives rise to new meanings. (Rossi 1981, 19)
Works become maps of hunches — serving as both a guide to the decisions made in the production of the work, and an agitator of uneasy, shifting, implied associations that demand further exploration.
In collage-making, the once passive observer becomes an active participant, but the process of recombination is not obvious or predictable. One of the fundamental characteristics of collage is the investment it requires from the audience. Each person brings his or her own personal histories (and therefore deductive and associative powers) to the work, and each reading may be totally different. The technique of collage making is simultaneously expressive and generative.
Having trained as an architect, the built environment figures heavily in my personal work. Collage is one of the closest forms of artistic creation to the practice of architecture. Both involve an assembly of disparate elements into a compelling and unified whole, often without the author having had a direct hand in the creation of any one single element.
An architectural project must be carefully pre-meditated, requiring prolonged, communal effort. When working in collage paper-space, however, the disconnection and reconciliation of fragments is seductive and immediate, and able to evoke multiplicities of meaning.
My explorations in collage are rooted in the argument that collage offers the most relevant and meaningful process of contemporary artistic production available today. I am interested in continuing to use collage to explore the boundary between representation and meaning, between consumption and broadcast, and between intention and output.
Sources
Adamowicz, Elza. 1998. Surrealist Collage in Text and Image : Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rossi, Aldo. 1981. A Scientific Autobiography. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
