On Collage

Defining collage for myself.

First and foremost—I think collage is a uniquely vague medium. It can be completely undefined in its materials. Ready-mades can be collage (think Duchamp’s upturned urinal, Fountain). Some paintings are a collage (think Rauschenberg’s Bed). But I really love living in the realm of paper collage—which is definitely more traditional and perhaps regarded as more “conservative” (here I’ll point to the early 20th century and Dadaist collage). And there’s an even greater distinction to be made within this: I adore working with mass-produced, printed images. I am pulling from manuals, encyclopedias, anthologies, and largely books that were meant to be used as informative resources in an age before digitalization, Wikipedia, the internet.

Historically, collage began as an assemblage of images and paper scraps. Coller, a French verb, means “to glue”. And in this sense I am working the “old-fashioned” way: I am using glue, I am using paste, I am sticking things together, over each other, under themselves, folded over.

Often, when I say “collage” people assume I am referring to mood boards—a practice where someone collects images that appeal to them and then curates a spread, in which each image retains its individual identity or main features. And this is not what I am doing or trying to do. And often, I am not even using images that appeal to me, but rather quite the contrary.

Instead, I think of collage as a tool for abstraction (this is hardly a new idea, rather it is a very old, modernist idea). The greater “whole” I am trying to create is not based in narrative or figurative scenes. Image selection—in this specific version of the process—is often arbitrary and cold. I can hate the content of every single image I have chosen and yet I will work with each one until they are all unrecognizable (relatedly: I am completely disinterested in photomontage).

The greatest appeal of collage is being able to reduce any image to color, texture, and shape, and to literally destroy subjective connotations through a meditative yet automatic process. In layman’s terms, I am using scissors and gluesticks to cut up pictures and put them back together to make something that is no longer a landscape, an object, or a figure. And I’m trying to do this by working quickly so as to not get bogged down in the content, blurring my vision to focus on the general composition or contrast.

One book I love to work with happens to be a WWII encyclopedia. It is filled with giant pictures of tanks and bombs and submarines. Another book I like to work with is a visual summary of the world’s greatest natural disasters. Another one I keep around is a coffee table book of seashells. I have frequently used images from all three texts in one piece (although it would be pretty difficult to spot this).

Subtraction and addition.

No part of my collage process is subtractive. To me this seems pretty unique: a painter can scrape away paint on the canvas, a writer can delete a phrase from a paragraph, and a musician can remove a bar or change key. Even a sculptor starts with a block of marble and chisels away at it, literally subtracting stone. I work in layers and I can only build up. I can only perform addition. Separating layers after they’ve dried will destroy whatever layer is underneath, or compromise the paper base onto which I have glued it. At first this caused me to plan all parts of the collage in advance. I would shift the scraps of paper around, weaving and unweaving until I was satisfied. This would take hours and even then, once the gluing was finished, I was less than fulfilled.

More recently I have begun to work “automatically”. I glue a base down and incorporate large fragments immediately. They are usually whatever I can grab. I will have six or seven books sitting open, as well as stacks of torn pages laying around. I will—quite literally—be swimming in a pool of images all blending together, their sources no longer discernable. Guns and crabs and mudslides—they are all brown. It is all in a pile. At first, this method will yield something I really, really don’t like. The initial layers are often very ugly, incongruous, and sloppy. And the best part of this is that I can’t undo it, and so the only solution is forward: I can only perform addition.

Another issue I have repeatedly stumbled across is transparency. In mediums such as painting, paints can be thinned to create transparent washes or layers. In digital mediums this easily done with two clicks of a button. Even in audio, volumes can be lowered or raised and tracks can be easily overlaid on top of each other. But paper is opaque, and unless the image is printed on wax paper or acetate, there are not many ways of finding transparent images. Mind you, I am only using found-image and I refrain from printing anything for the sole purpose of destroying it downstream. One solution to my qualm is image-transfer. I am still considering what this could mean for me.

Visual agnosticism.

Image selection is not completely blind. Some images can’t be touched—and how do we determine this? Tough question. Gut feeling? Like I wrote above, I frequently work with WWII history books and they contain images of the Holocaust. I don’t touch these. Encyclopedias will have chapters on Vietnam War-era biological warfare. I don’t touch these. Yet with anatomy textbooks, dissected bone marrows are okay. An entry on industrial farming containing a photo of a slaughterhouse, somehow this can be okay too. I don’t have a preference for these images, but sometimes they end up being incorporated. It can be uncomfortable, but in these instances I really think about how these images perform as part of a whole. Or how their identities end up being masked and the contents nothing more than a patch of color or pixelated texture. If a tree falls in the wood and no one hears it…if a collage abstracts a form and no one sees it... Is there a beauty in this process? That it allows the viewer to remain ignorant?

A conclusion?

Unlike other mediums that I have been introduced and re-introduced to over the course of my creative life, collage has been the only that has allowed me to develop a personal voice. In many ways, collage-making is less a tuned skill and more of a set of constraints or a framework of thinking. This allows it to traverse beyond the world of paper and touch the universe around it. It is gorgeously unconfined by its material. As I am not a practicing artist right now, with no studio space and no stipend, it remains the most accessible form of expression available to me. However, I avidly endorse “the collage” as a medium not because it is cheap or easy, but because it frequently prompts me to think deeper about the simplicity (or non-simplicity) of my process and my source material. Right now I work with printed image, but in the past I have used tires, beach plastics, hair, lace, and dried grasses (to name a few). The framework of thought—the basis of abstraction—has remained the same, even if the materials have not.

There are many aspects of collage that I have not elaborated on here. I will address them at a later time.

AS 08/25/24