about collage
Collage technique is the systematic exploitation of the chance or artificially provoked confrontation of two or more mutually alien realities on an obviously inappropriate level — and the poetic spark which jumps across when these realities approach each other.
Max Ernst
Western Art collage technique had its beginnings in the early 20th century, following on from the craft technique papier collé. Papiers collés — pasted papers or paper sticks — are, essentially, ornamental designs created by pasting decorative papers on a backing. The word collage derives from the French verb coller, which means to stick, paste or glue. And very broadly speaking, a collage is an artistic composition made by literally sticking different things on a backing.
In 1912 French artist Georges Braque created his first papier collé. He used wood grain wallpaper, charcoal and paint mixed with sand to create Fruit Dish and Glass. Braque's experiment breached the boundaries between art and craft, and more importantly, it opened the way for the development of Western Art collage technique.
Braque's work inspired his colleague and friend, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, to explore the potential of papier collé. Over the short period 1912 - 1914 Picasso's Guitar works transition from papier collé to collage to construction, and the series culminates with a sheet metal guitar. Picasso's works include ready-made or existing objects (objets trouvés) and found objects (trouvailles), and he made the leap to three dimensions, thus anticipating assemblage art.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 certainly impacted, and arguably disrupted, the development of collage technique, but its future was secure. With its reliance on chance, and found objects, collage technique was quickly recognized by other artists. The process was taken up by, amongst many others, Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp, Johannes Theodor Baargeld, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, George Grozs, Benjamin Péret, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Salvador Dalí, André Breton, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Georges Hugnet, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. By mid-century the technique had been utilized by Cubists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Constructivists and Socialist Realists.
The terms photocollage and photomontage were struck into existence to describe collages made entirely with photographs. Collage itself, being descended from a craft and using ready-made and found objects, faced legitimacy issues from the start. But collage works that used only photographs made collage something of a triple insult, at least in rarefied art circles. Photographs are not only objets trouvés, they are the products of what was, at the time, an entirely illegitimate fledgling craft. To this day the debate rages on around photography and digital photography — can they be High Art or not? Nonetheless, two duos, Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, and John Heartfield and George Grozs, claim to have first used the term photomontage to describe their works circa 1918.
Artists continued to push the logical limits of collage by using larger and larger objets trouvés and trouvailles. Eventually, a new art form was identified to accommodate these three dimensional collages constructed from found objects. Thus, assemblage art was born of collage.
It's no coincidence that collage technique, and then assemblage art, came into existence when they did. The 19th century heralded the proliferation of printed materials and the beginning of photography, while the 20th century brought mass produced, affordable, and largely disposable, ready-made goods. Collage technique and assemblage art were only possible by virtue of these developments, and it can be suggested that they were rational responses to the chaotic and opposing trajectories of European societies at the time.
Early 20th century Western societies were racing toward a shiny new future with the promise of Modernity at the core and at the fore. The promise was the emancipation of humanity, and domination of the natural world — via reason, science and the spread of civilization. However, as ideology and technology precipitously barreled toward the bright light of all things shiny and new, the reality for humanity was no cause for optimism.
Societies were experiencing monumental breakdowns and fragmentations as the European social fabric was literally being torn apart. And the Spanish flu of 1918 was a pandemic the likes of which the world had never seen. Meanwhile, European colonialism and imperialism were entrenched across the globe. As a result, much of the first half of the 20th century was a time of strife in many European, and other, countries.
Industrialization, new technologies, mass production and mechanical reproduction advanced at a ferocious pace through Western societies. This meant there were all sorts of new things produced and reproduced on a mass scale, including the tools of war. And there were new things being displaced, discarded and destroyed on a mass scale, including humans.
World War I brought the onset of technologized, mechanized, mechanical warfare. This made war bloodier, and far more lethal, than ever before. The inter war period saw the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler and Stalin's purges. And finally, World War II produced the Holocaust and its logical conclusion — the politics of annihilation via nuclear warfare. In short, within roughly three decades tens of millions of people were systematically slaughtered, and the planet itself could now be destroyed many times over.
By 1945 the order of the world had been completely overturned. And during the three preceding decades the world was becoming an increasingly uncertain, fractured and chaotic place of cast-offs, scraps and fragments. It's no wonder, then, that art forms predicated on chance, and that cannibalize cast-offs, scraps and fragments materialized.
On one hand, the early 20th century was a time of material bonanza for the Western world, and for artists willing to engage with objets trouvés. On the other hand, there were times of great scarcity when the mere availability of something, or its chance finding, could be a determining factor in its becoming an objet d'art.
The propagandized media machine — newspapers, magazine articles, propaganda leaflets and posters — behind war efforts produced and reproduced the documentation of socio-politico-cultural-economic crises. This in turn created a whole new sort of grist for the artistic machine, and collage technique in particular.
It was quickly manifest that these propagandized materials could be employed in collage as social commentary, critique and protest. And the abundance of ready-made domestic and personal items performed a similar, albeit less articulate, function in assemblage art.
When war, waste, mechanized slaughter and annihilation are the pinnacles of human achievement in an epoch, it is not difficult to imagine how an existential crisis might ensue. Thus, some artists were inclined to reject the imperatives of Beauty and High Art, in favor of these new techniques premised on chance, found objects and the ready-made.
Max Ernst's description of collage technique as "the systematic exploitation of the chance or artificially provoked confrontation of two or more mutually alien realities on an obviously inappropriate level — and the poetic spark which jumps across when these realities approach each other" is very dense indeed. It's also an exquisitely erudite description of collage technique that comes nowhere close to alluding to the literal process of acquiring, manipulating and sticking pieces of paper, or anything else, on a backing.
The terminology in his description of collage technique reflects the age, and Ernst's experiences, quite specifically. Max Ernst served in the German Army during World War I, and in 1941 during World War II — after being interned in France in 1939 — he was forced to flee to the United States. It is not a stretch to suggests that his words should also be understood as a metaphor for, and critique of, war.
The quote suggests power relations and contrived confrontations, and it's ripe with warfare subtexts. It only ends, after all the turmoil, with a poetic spark — some act of creation — jumping across. It doesn't take much to imagine a young Ernst witnessing artillery fire and being forced to find a redeeming quality in the horror — by decontextualizing artillery fire, and seeing it as a poetic spark jumping across (before it explodes its mark).
Ernst's systematic exploitation, chance, artificially provoked confrontation, mutually alien realities and the obviously inappropriate level can each easily be understood as aspects of war. War is often a confrontation, of two or more mutually alien realities, that has been artificially provoked — forced — on an obviously inappropriate — violent — level. Technology enabled the systematic exploitation of populations, geography and resources on a scale not possible before the 20th century. Chance is always an element of war — all sorts of things happen by chance, people survive by chance, sometimes armies fall by chance. Referring to any confrontation as artificially provoked is as much to say that the confrontation is unnecessary, as it would not have occurred at all had it not been artificially provoked. And the mutually alien realities can be understood as enemy soldiers meeting on a battlefield, or as the meetings of displaced, migratory refugee populations with settled populations, or in internment camps.
It's significant that Ernst uses a dash to set apart the end, the redemption or rebalancing, of the statement — and the poetic spark which jumps across when these realities approach each other. The punctuation indicates a literal break from what went before, while connecting it to something else, and graphically it looks like a tiny bridge. Hence we move from systematic exploitation, an even figuratively violent act, to bridging the fractures with the poetic spark and the implied act of creation. And it is only ever the poetic spark that jumps across, between people, that can truly bridge the schisms of war via encouraging understanding and the will to peace. Ernst tells us that even in the face and fact of war, and all its manipulations, fragmentations, displacements, a new synthesis is possible amongst seemingly incommensurate constituents — if only they are receptive to the poetic spark when it ignites and jumps across.
Bringing this back to collage technique per se, redemption, or synthesis, occurs at the end of this agonistic scenario or process in something like a dialectic of collage. If we take an image that will be used in a collage as an original thesis that undergoes collage dialectic, we can understand this process begins with a number of images (theses) that are manipulated and transformed from their original state (antitheses), and finally, they are recontextualized and composed into a new whole (synthesis) — the collage.
The poetic spark is something wholly other and independent from, yet contingent upon, the mutually alien realities approaching each other. It's ignited by the tensions created by the juxtapositions of mutually alien realities — as represented in or by incongruous images — that one would not normally conceptualize together. The poetic spark may be the shock or surprise at seeing something out of context, or recontextualized in a strange setting. Whatever way it manifests, the poetic spark is also that which will unify the mutually alien realities in the end. It can illuminate the constituents in new ways, and it may suggest previously unrecognized or unacknowledged relationships between the once mutually alien realities. And finally, the chance, and the joy, of collage comes not only from chancing upon its constituent parts, but in seeing what it is that the poetic spark may illuminate in the final analysis.
Collage technique is by no means limited to art. In fact, the organizing principle of collage — sans the paste or glue — spread far and wide throughout the 20th century, and the principle is alive and well today.
The far reaching ramifications of this fall beyond the scope of these words, although a few things can be said in brief. A very tangible and current example is the practice of sampling in music, which uses parts of existing works in new works. The creation of web pages, which uses code to stick or stitch together different graphics, texts, documents, videos, etc., can be seen as happening under the guiding principle of collage. Even outsourcing production overseas, and then assembling a product in another location, or erecting a prefab structure, is achieved under something like a collage principle. In short, much of what we produce today is done by pulling together disparate parts and things to create something else or something new.