Collage is an art that defies its roots. Just about every artist and designer (as well as every child and non-artist) has pasted together disparate scraps of things either to express a coded or universal message. László Moholy-Nagy considered it the mechanical art for a mechanical age. It was the radical alternative to conventional art and was so frequently associated in work by Moderns representing Cubism, Constructivism, Dada, Futurism, Social Realism, Surrealism and propaganda of all stripes. It was a tool for fascism, communism, socialism and virtually every ideology with a message to convey.
Collage has been the subject of so many art books and scholarly treatises that the publication of more is barely met with any degree of excitement today. However, excitement is an apt response to the current volume Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage by Freya Gowrley (Princeton University Press). It is new and deep in its exploration of the “mode” (Gowrley states, “In this book collage is neither a medium nor genre, but a mode; a means of processing the world as it was encountered by individuals across cultures and geographies, who subsequently produced a creative response to that experience”). Throughout the text she explores its range from religious to folk to avant garde approaches—from anonymous Victorians to Faith Ringgold’s African American quilts—and a bit of DIY.
Below, Gowrley, a scholar and the author of Domestic Spaces in Britain, 1750–1849, talks to me about the origins of the “mode” in its spiritual and rebellious manifestations (with a pinch of AI too).
You say that most histories posit the Cubist papier collé as the invention of collage. What do you propose?
I think any statement of a definitive moment of invention is going to inevitably misrepresent a more complex reality, so I probably wouldn’t propose a single alternative for when collage was “invented.” I guess I’d propose multiple instances of creation, whether using paper, or found objects, or whatever, as contributing practices which culminate in the kind of form we recognize as collage today.
Religion has a hand in collage. What was the reason for pictorial assemblages?
The relationship between collage and the expression of devotion is absolutely at the heart of the book. This manifests in both the romantic and religious senses of the term, and we see manifestations of the latter from early Christianity onwards. As we see later on, this kind of collage becomes associated with rituals of religious devotion, such as pilgrimage, as part of which you might acquire images and relics associated with saints. Likewise, relics become a vital part of the liturgical furniture in the medieval period, so we see the emergence of a whole religious visual culture predicated on the display of these goods subsumed within elaborate and often very costly compositions.
How was collage perceived in painting? Was it an opportunity to fit many narratives into one frame?
One of the things that really fascinated me about this way of approaching collage as a form was the opportunity to bring multiple forms of visual and material culture from across distinct periods into dialogue. Still-life painting, in particular, has a really clear relationship with later papier collé, as the recent MET exhibition Cubism and the Trompe L’Oeil really reinforced. The show brought together Cubist works with early modern painting in this beautiful juxtaposition. As a painterly mode, the collagic absolutely encourages the presentation of multiple narratives, but also multiple moments, multiple perspectives, multiple ways of seeing, something which is absolutely echoed in later work.
Is there a fundamental distinction between collage and assemblage?
The traditional answer here would be to stress a distinction between the “flat” and the “fat,” that is, between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional. I can absolutely see this as being an important way of distinguishing between forms, but for me, I’m interested in how these forms are united by a shared mode of creation through the various acts that combination encompasses. Both collage and assemblage are united by a series of material and visual gestures that include acquisition, selection and arrangement, and those are the compelling relations between these modes to me.
Hannah Hoch is one of my collage heroes. What made her work modern?
Hoch is actually super interesting in that she’s often cited as being directly inspired by earlier modes of the fragmentary, specifically homemade photomontages, so I actually wouldn’t emphasize too strong a distinction between her work and that which preceded it. Nevertheless, what I think makes her work so distinctly of its period is her presentation of the modern feminine subject. Using images from contemporary women’s magazines, Hoch is literally reconstituting what it is to be a woman at a time when the contours of this were shifting and being redrawn. It’s that perfect culmination of art and the time and place in which it was made.
You suggest that collage is a woman’s language of art. How so?
Here, I’m drawing heavily on Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer’s essay, published in the 1970s, titled “Waste Not, Want Not: An Inquiry Into What Women Saved and Assembled — Femmage.” This is an absolutely foundational text within the feminist art movement, and it’s one that strongly shaped my thinking about how the various kinds of crafts and art-making women engaged in throughout history might be thought of not only as a distinctively feminine mode, but one that stretches across time. I wouldn’t say that collage is necessarily a woman’s language of art, but I would say that it’s one that folk who have often been excluded from mainstream art history engaged in, and that’s significant.
Can you explain what a “collage intervention” is? With punk, collage appeared to be vernacular. Was there something other than a DIY aesthetic at work?
I think what is crucial in punk collage is the end to which that DIY aesthetic is employed, namely in the interrogation of the socio-cultural hegemony, whether that is thematically or in its mode of representation. The work of Linder Sterling really emphasizes this to me—her work doesn’t necessarily have a DIY aesthetic (no more than all collage does), but her work is employed by bands like the Buzzcocks precisely because in skewers the mores of the day in its subject and attitude. On Sterling’s cover of the single Orgasm Addict, for example, we see a nude woman, her head replaced with an iron, whose objectification is rendered in a literal form in her collage.
Images courtesy Princeton University Press
Where is collage situated in the continuum of art today?
This is a difficult question that I try to address in the conclusion. There are undoubtedly more collagists than ever before. As a form it continues to be highly accessible and so there is an implicit equitability in its undertaking. Thanks to the work of craftivists and socially engaged artists, it continues to be a power tool for critique. But what does the future of collage look like? I guess in order to answer this question, I’d say we should look to the past, and the mutability and transmedial vitality that collage has always had. The development of increasingly sophisticated AI generators will inevitably affect these forms, as it will across all genres of art, but I think this will only be one more transformation in a form that has such a long and varied history.
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