Jeffrey Thompson
Overview
Collage is arguably the most accessible of the major art forms. It is, in its most basic form, graphically straightforward, structurally minimalist, and easy to comprehend. The mechanical prerequisites are basic and to the point, requiring elements of graphic media, some form of adhesive, and a stable surface to receive the work. Media refers to any source of imagery or combination of graphic elements which might include typography, photography, and printmaking, as well as found, altered, language, symbols, the written word, gestural marks, print media, and manufactured imagery.
Collage is a visually graphic art form that incorporates a collection of elements, juxtaposed within a graphic variable format, which comprises a form of unconscious visualization or other intellectual statement. It is typically produced in a two dimensional format with compositions that range from simple to highly complex.
The earliest forms of collage date to the Han dynasty around 200 BC. It also appeared later in Japan during the 10th century when calligraphers and poets began to use it as an adjunct to their work. Contemporary collage draws from a wide range of visual disciplines, including painting, photography, illustration, and printmaking and incorporates numerous elements, including typography, mass publications, popular media, as well as numerous other graphic elements, including drawn and painted forms of signature line work and mark making.
Collage as a creative approach extends across a range of disciplines including music, literature, visual art, and dance. As an expressive act, collage is essential, ephemeral, and extremely personal. Each of these aspects informs the work uniquely. In its best iterations it transforms the sometimes chaotic past into a pastiche of forward thinking elements and reimagined constructs. This point of view is essential to its successful execution. For the purposes of this break down I will focus on its visual aspects and some of their various implications.
An essential purpose of collage, as with much of contemporary art, is to describe, illuminate, and comment upon the human condition. It is linked to our identity and our basic humanity. As humans we exist as creatures of collective thought, vetted over time, and carefully assembled as our basic intellectual architecture. We learn by modeling, improving and reinventing the work of our predecessors. This exact process is at the heart of collage making. It is the reimagining and reassembly of work that has gone before. Therefore it is necessarily adaptive, with the concept of appropriating art as fundamental to its very premise. As a discipline it exists in opposition to the very idea of intellectual property. Collage is an expression of human existence and the ongoing expansion of intellectual thought.
Philosophically, collage exists firmly within the artistic canon, hinging on the paradox of identity and the nature of human experience. It employs a unique and highly personal form of expression in an effort to describe and comment upon our common experience. Its subject matter extends from the personal to the universal. It subverts any consideration of copyright and assumes the absolute right of free appropriation. It asserts, in the interest of free expression, that all forms of visual media are available and in the realm of fair use.
Content
The juxtaposition of compositional components is crucial and largely determines the heart of the work. Where and how these elements are sourced is not simply random, but instead becomes essential to the back story, and is therefor key to the overall success of the piece.
Composing a collage does not lend itself to a uniform approach. Beyond the fundamentals of construction and assembly, which include collecting, organizing, preparing, and applying the material, very little can be reliably relayed about standard processes. Beyond basic methods and practices, the formal activity of collage making is fundamentally human and therefore varies wildly. It involves free association, intuition, and random connection. Whether complex or simplistic, what generates interest in the work seems to be attention to detail tempered by an ironic juxtaposition of elements. The totality of this creative act is offset and augmented by unique inspiration and innovation. Humor is frequently a way to frame the approach to creating content. However, what is considered humorous to one group or individual sect is highly relative and varies over time, especially within a specific cultural context, and by location. Tragedy, over time, often transitions to comedy. What is funny in Berlin may not go over well in Brooklyn. Medieval humor bears precious little resemblance to contemporary comedy. Therefore a keen understanding of science, history, and geography, to mention only a few, and its individual relationship to imagery and meaning, become invaluable as the artist composes the work. Politics can also contribute to a unique class of collage that will become necessarily moralistic and didactic. This function can often distort or subvert meaning. Worse, it can allow the work to be taken hostage by wildly diverse political factions and may allow it to be put to unintended and highly destructive ends.
Successful collage requires a kind of alchemy of assembly, using academic knowledge and human interpretation, overlaid with elements of random association. Accidental or incidental connections allow for unexpected results and can achieve unique moments of epiphany. It is within the juncture of execution and personal observation that previously disconnected elements converge into meaning. This type of epiphany is the holy grail of collage making. It is that final stage when the artist is able to see the totality of the finished work all at once. It is the point of discovery in which the elements suddenly align and we discover something new and unforeseen. A thing discovered that had not been specifically sought.
The search for imagery and meaning is at the very heart of collage. It is a convergence of the personal and the general. It is where the autobiographical experience collides with universal occurrence. It requires a kind of dedication to disciplined technique combined with a commensurate surrender of control. It allows for unconscious mechanisms to overlap onto conscious experience.
This creative process assumes the participation of the spiritual and denies the role of mankind as the sole progenitor of artistic excellence. By inviting the super natural muse into the creative act the artist draws upon the collective unconscious, and by virtue of this exercise, infers the existence of such a resource. Familiarity with this practice informs its practical importance. It establishes an existential component of the creative process. By employing the unconscious, the artist is saying in essence: I dream, therefore I am.
Collage is a pictographic language, relying on unconscious free association. While it is related to language, often including typographic elements, it does not rely upon literal interpretation. Its meaning may be purely aesthetic, focused on form rather than definition. It subsumes under its paradigm all aspects of communication and imaginings, and therefore precedes these elemental practices as primary in the evolutionary order of essential artistic disciplines.
Collage has always paralleled human history as a kind of subversive construct, appearing and disappearing throughout its evolution. It was not recognized as a significant class of the artistic canon until the modern era. Its context is primal, with its fundamental components rooted in language. It has kept pace with invention, technology, and craft, and will likely increase in significance and stature over time.
**********
Notes on process and history
Collage is arguably the most accessible of all the major art forms. In its most basic context it is straightforward, structurally minimalist, and fairly easy to comprehend. The mechanical prerequisites are simple. It often requires some form of adhesive, some element of graphic media, and a stable surface to receive the work. Additionally the piece may expand or contract compositionally to include drawing, painting, and even three dimensional elements, although work extending beyond two dimensions may differentiate it from the definition of pure collage. That is of course largely a curatorial consideration and is likely irrelevant to the creative process. I refer to media here as any external or secondary source of imagery or combination of graphic elements which might include typography and photography, as well as found, altered, or manufactured objects. The juxtaposition of these compositional components is crucial and largely determines the heart of the work. Where and how these elements are sourced is not simply random, but instead becomes essential to the back story, and is therefor key to the overall success of the piece.
The practice of collage encompasses everything from low craft to high art, with notable achievements by a broad range of artisans, from hobbyists to ancient craftsmen to modern masters. Rigorous and noteworthy achievement in the discipline is often associated with highly conceptual or deeply intellectual thought, though numerous exceptions to this rule have been documented. Recent history has begun to acknowledge work by neuro-diverse artists who have independently generated brilliant examples of the form. It seems clear that beyond basic mechanical metrics, few rules of any kind are absolute as it relates to this particular aesthetic field and even those that do apply seem highly situational, with a great many notable exceptions. These facts appear to make collage the most populist and democratic of all art forms.
Collage draws its name from the French, Papier Colle: to glue or stick together, and is related to numerous other forms such as Decoupage, Photomontage, Digital collage, and Mosaic. The artists Picasso and Braque are credited with elevating collage to the status of high art. Their Cubist paintings became increasingly fragmented and abstract as the work developed. They eventually developed a style of painting referred to as Synthetic Cubism, which allowed them to import words and other elements such as newspaper clippings, forms, scraps of paper and labels. Braque increasingly used papier collé to represent real objects in his work.
In that same era Duchamp proclaimed the death of retinal art and famously elevated the found object or “readymade” to unique intellectual heights. This promotion of ordinary objects to artistic status by intellectual decree helped restore the creative process to the ‘service of the mind’. Duchamp stated that readymades are "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice.” That is to say the classification was aesthetically subjective, and reframed art making as a fundamentally intellectual process. Collage extended this approach to include fragmentary imagery and discarded graphics as appropriate and highly relevant.
Collage rapidly established itself as a stable, accessible vehicle for the evolution of contemporary creative expression. It was responsive and allowed direct action. It engaged the subconscious through free and random association, and necessarily integrated contemporary themes by its use of both modern typography and contemporary photographic media. It ignored the concept of proprietary rights, deferring instead to a kind of intellectual necessity. This allowed for the free appropriation of imagery and stimulated the creative process. Its evolving potential as a vehicle for visualizing intellectual thought had given rise to a largely new art form.
Dada and surrealism
The Dada movement started in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I, as a revolt against conventional artistic values. Dada later developed into Surrealism, which expanded many of the fundamentals of the movement to include psychological and spiritual imagery. Collage reinforced the basic tenets of the anti-art movement and grew out of a need to reject formalism.
The "Merzbilder" collages of Kurt Schwitters were constructed from discarded materials and spoke to the chaos of the era. Max Ernst produced a number of collages, and incorporated rubbed patterns, or frottage, in his work. Wolf Vostell established decollage, deconstructed collages using scraps of posters and 'found' materials. Jean Arp, Picabia, and the American abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell further extended the practice.
