Cut&Paste: About gestalten’s wonderful book THE AGE OF COLLAGE VOL. 3

The art form of col­lage has always been close­ly linked to pho­tog­ra­phy. Pho­tog­ra­phy played a role in two ways: on the one hand, pho­tog­ra­phers and col­lage artists used their own pho­tos, on the oth­er hand, pho­tographs were used as objets trou­vés. We remem­ber our own col­lage phase in our child­hood when we com­bined pic­tures from mail order cat­a­logs into col­lages. The glue stick was our best friend. This is just meant as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for why I wrote about the book “THE AGE OF COLLAGE VOL.3. Con­tem­po­rary Col­lage in Mod­ern Art” from Gestal­ten-Ver­lag – here in the pho­tog­ra­phy sec­tion of this blog.

In the intro­duc­tion, the Lon­don author and cura­tor Francesca Gavin tells a short sto­ry of the col­lage. „Think about how you look at the world. It is not a lin­ear, coher­ent expe­ri­ence. Instead, it is a mélange of snip­pets of move­ment and angles, inter­spersed with blink­ing, and put togeth­er into some­thing log­i­cal by your brain. ” And that’s exact­ly how the col­lage works, explains Gavin.

Gavin dis­cov­ers ances­tors of the 20^th cen­tu­ry art form col­lage in Japan­ese cal­lig­ra­phy of the 12^th cen­tu­ry and in West­ern Euro­pean art of the 17^th cen­tu­ry – and final­ly in the pho­tomon­tages of the 19^th cen­tu­ry. Picasso’s and Braque’s exper­i­ments with col­lages are then seen as the start­ing point of the art his­to­ry of col­lage, with­out the Cubists being seen as the inven­tors of col­lage. Gavin men­tions the impor­tance of the Dadaists and the artis­tic use of col­lage by Kurt Schwit­ters and Han­nah Höch, for exam­ple, and this is how the devel­op­ment of col­lage in the his­to­ry of art in the 20^th cen­tu­ry took its course.

On the impor­tance of pho­tog­ra­phy in the fur­ther course of the col­lage his­to­ry, Gavin writes: “Pho­to­graph­ic mate­r­i­al has also been trans­formed by the dig­i­tal. The cut itself has become invis­i­ble, unless the artist delib­er­ate­ly wants to show it. (…) The func­tion of pho­to­graph­ic imagery has com­plete­ly changed. It is no longer seen as a straight rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the truth. ” The seem­ing­ly invi­o­lable rela­tion­ship between pho­tog­ra­phy and real­i­ty is begin­ning to become doubt­ful, the manip­u­la­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy is gain­ing a greater role in many ways, and in the col­lage manip­u­la­tion is raised to be a basic prin­ci­ple. Dig­i­tal image manip­u­la­tion con­tin­ues this en masse, at the lat­est after the inven­tion of Pho­to­shop. „The process of addi­tion and removal and com­bin­ing con­trast­ing ele­ments is not just an artis­tic process. It is a way of think­ing.”

The third col­lage vol­ume from Gestal­ten-Ver­lag con­tains the works of dozens of col­lage artists from recent years, for exam­ple those of the Cana­di­an artist Peter Hor­vath, who con­nect­ed icon­ic por­traits (for exam­ple by Fri­da Kahlo, Jacque­line Kennedy, Angela Davis or John Wayne) asso­cia­tive­ly with land­scapes (John Wayne’s west­ern land­scapes), let­ters, scraps of text, clip­pings from adver­tis­ing and film posters and over­paint­ing. Hor­vath main­ly draws on his­tor­i­cal mate­r­i­al from the 1940s to 1970s and quotes, sat­i­rizes, and under­mines the adver­tis­ing lan­guage of that time. Horvath’s lay­ers on his col­lages are some­times rem­i­nis­cent of the lay­ers of adver­tis­ing posters stuck on and part­ly torn off again on adver­tis­ing pil­lars, col­lages cre­at­ed by poster stick­ers, as it were, acci­den­tal­ly and unin­ten­tion­al­ly.

Ams­ter­dam-based col­lage artist B.D. Graft has a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent approach. He draws on even old­er mod­els, clas­sic paint­ings, doc­u­men­tary black and white pho­tographs, book pages, post­cards and pastes them over with yel­low, pink or blue sur­faces and cov­ers and destroys their orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed effect. But Graft also sees the con­struc­tive nature of his work, name­ly by mak­ing com­par­isons of his work on remix­ing and sam­pling in the music sec­tor.

The Japan­ese artist Ken­suke Koike uses very sim­ple means to alien­ate old, found black-and-white pho­tographs, for exam­ple by cut­ting out the eyes, nose and mouth of a por­trait and stick­ing them some­where else; or by cut­ting up pho­tos and stick­ing them back togeth­er incor­rect­ly. This often cre­ates a sur­pris­ing, con­fus­ing, play­ful effect.

British artist Seana Gavin pro­duces dream world col­lages. Typ­i­cal acces­sories for her cre­ations are pic­tures of mush­rooms, sec­tions of land­scapes, pho­tographs of stat­ues, black and white pic­tures of clouds of smoke or steam, which are asso­cia­tive­ly linked to form mys­te­ri­ous night­mare col­lages. „I am inter­est­ed in dif­fer­ent states of con­scious­ness where the rules of real­i­ty do not apply,” she explains her approach.

The Cana­di­an artist Scott Tre­leav­en works much more sim­ply, but with a com­pa­ra­ble dream-like effect, that cre­ates its effect by com­bin­ing two halved, torn pho­tos into one image. Tre­leav­en, for exam­ple, merges a stair­case land­scape with water reflec­tions, or a nude pho­to with a sun­set, or a blurred par­rot pho­to with the image of some pane. This seems ran­dom and asso­cia­tive and it forces the view­er to find nar­ra­tives, con­nec­tions and log­ics that may not even exist.

THE AGE OF COLLAGE VOL. 3 pro­vides a won­der­ful vari­ety of con­tem­po­rary col­lage art. Francesca Gavin’s texts on the indi­vid­ual artists repeat­ed­ly come across aspects of the col­lages that are sur­pris­ing. And as is often the case with the Berlin­er Gestal­ten-Ver­lag, the book design (Johan­na Posiege) ensures a con­vinc­ing over­all effect of this work.

THE AGE OF COLLAGE VOL. 3. Con­tem­po­rary Col­lage in Mod­ern Art.
Edit­ed by Robert Klanten and Lin­coln Dex­ter
Texts by Francesca Gavin
Pub­lished by gestal­ten, Berlin 2020