ABOUT COLLAGE

The twentieth century’s ‘single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation’^[i] was first used by the artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, in 1912, when they began to paste objects onto the surfaces of their paintings, including everyday ephemera such as newspaper clippings or ticket stubs. For them, the role of art was not just to document life, but to embody it. Before long, their method had a name: collage. Coined by the poet Apollinaire, the word collage derives from the French word coller, meaning to paste. But, as Marjorie Perloff has noted, ‘the process of pasting is only the beginning of collage’.^[ii] Brandon Taylor points out that, idiomatically, just as in English, the word coller can refer to students ‘absorbed (collés) in their books’, to dogs with ‘their noses collés à la voie or “stuck to the path”’, to unauthorised sexual relationships, and, when prefixed with the word papier, to wallpaper.^[iii] So whilst a collage may simply be, on the one hand, what the Chambers dictionary terms ‘a picture made up from scraps of paper and other odds and ends pasted up’, it may also embody what Daniel Belgrad calls ‘the combined intellectual, emotional, and physical engagement of the body-mind with its environment’.^[iv] Furthermore, collage evolved as a visual, material practice with strong poetic associations – re-invented by artists, named by a poet, used by both. In other words, collage is about sticking string and scraps of ephemera to paper; and it is also about an intellectual and emotional relationship with a given aesthetic environment.

Collage is about encounters. Its advent in the twentieth century brought about the deconstruction of old barriers between language and art, with the use of pasted letters in paintings giving rise ‘to poetic associations which mere spots of colour [could] not evoke’, to quote Christian Zervos^[v]. This in turn brought about the dissolution of perceived impediments between art and life, demanding that the viewer, reader, or listener increasingly play their own role in the landscape of a work of art or literature, simultaneously experiencing what Daniel Kane calls the ‘provocative joys of juxtaposition and mysteriousness’, whilst also contemplating what it is that ‘constitutes authority, identity, voice, originality, sincerity, and art’.^[vi] Its name’s origin is deceptively simple, even contentious, given that it so readily spans the disciplines. Collage has been described variously as ‘the growth of the surface towards us in real space’; as ‘the sensation of physically operating on the world’; and as an ‘intuitive self-definition of the artist among objects’.^[vii] It is multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary: artistic systems of order, upon whose assumed absence the collage aesthetic is founded, are replaced by what Martyn Chalk calls simply ‘some intuitive grasp of how the world might be put together’.^[viii] Joe Brainard’s collages, for instance, are illuminated by the premise that the ‘highly personal magic’ that emanates from his chosen materials enables those materials, regardless of their separateness, to have an effect on one another.^[ix] Collage not only ‘declares the continuity of realms’ – it also declares the contiguity of realms, and carries the ‘implications of a life beyond art’,^[x] without which the art in question could not exist. The context out of which the collage emerges is ultimately that from which it is made, embodying, as Thomas Brockelman suggests, ‘a kind of immediate presence beyond the necessity of representation’.^[xi]