Chewing through the literature about collage

I chose the title of this blog post deliberately because I was trying to express something of the process of reading for, and writing a systematic literature review about collage, as I experience moments of slow chewing, digestion (and sometimes) moments when I wonder if my eyes are bigger than my belly...

Yesterday, I realised that I had started the process of gathering literature over one year ago, in preparation for the funding bid for the Public Laundry Project. 
So, some confessions here. I suspect I may work more slowly than others in gathering literature. I find it almost impossible to be 'strategic' in the way I go about finding out about a topic. I worry about missing something and so gather exhaustively, disappear down wormholes (don't even ask how I got to ideas about 'glitches in the Matrix', from collage inquiry in dementia care). I worried about this a great deal when I did my PhD and the literature review chapter was somewhat exhaustive and exhausting but it served an important purpose. It satisfied my curiosity to turn a particular stone over and over again until I could see all sides. I find this bit of the process immensely satisfying.

As I chewed my way through another article I was reminded of a presentation given by Professor Sotaro Kita (known as Kita) at the Research Staff Forum at the University of Warwick in December 2022. Kita posed the question 'What type of research environment generates innovative research?'. He presented research by Wu, Wang and Evans (2019) that concluded that disruptive research 'digs deep in time' by 'exploring and amplifying promising ideas from older and less popular work' (p.381). 

This inspired me to 'dig deep in time' to explore the established position in much contemporary literature about collage inquiry, that collage started with the cubists in 1913. In doing so, I learned that sixty years before the embrace of collage techniques by the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage. This work is often dismissed as 'folk art', undermining the social and political commentary of this work and women's experiences in this period, for example describing this work as the 'quondom delight of schoolgirl and housewife' (Janis and Blesh, 1962) and not the concern of 'serious artists'. Professor Ann Bermingham has investigated the role of the scrapbook, and she  proposes that photocollages are an expression of desire for a world beyond the serious, highly structured Victorian reality represented in and by the photograph. 

The other observation emerging from the literature between the 1920s and the 1970s is the sheer proliferation and fragmentation of terms and methods associated with collage:

• Photocollage: A collage using photographs
• Photomontage: A more formal arrangement, defined by the Dada movement as a composite that carries a political message
• Fatagaga: A collage that combines image and text (another Dadaist invention)
• Collagraphy: Prints made from collage
• Action Collage: This term is described by performance theorist Richard Schechner, with the canvas reconcepualised 'as an arena in which to act - rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or express and object, actual or imagined' (Schechner, 1968) Here, collage has a narrative quality.
• Assemblage: A notion attributed to Debuffet (Lippard, 1962) that combines decalcomania and collage
• Collage: In the 1930s there was a general view that collage was an organisation of 'materials', and that the textural value of the materials chosen was characteristic of collage (Faulkner, 1938). This idea appears in literature from the 1950s also (Saltzman, 1952).
• Bricolage: A nexus between collage, assemblage and found objects (Kini-Singh, 2023).

I share these terms, not as a strategy for refining or reducing – or even to make decisions about what kind of practices I engage in - but to turn an expansive lens on all that collage can be. 

These terms assist in articulating something about the artistic method employed, the components that are chosen by the artist, and the overall effect created by the congregation of these elements. 

Interestingly, there is a common refrain across the literature of collage’s capacity to make the familiar strange, and I am reminded of Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt. In fact, I was delighted to come across John Heartfield’s photomontages (Selz, 1963). I was more familiar with Heartfield’s theatre designs for Brecht, so there is a thread there that needs some exploration another time.

Personally, I have decided to settle with plain old 'collage' in this project because it is the popular, recognised term. It is accessible and understandable to those who would not describe themselves as artists.

However, the exploration of terms has encouraged me to turn a lens on my own practice (which has disappeared down a doodling wormhole of late...) to consider introducing new elements that enhance or extend my experiments in ink drawing and bring me back to collage again. For now, here are a couple of ink drawings before I set off into new territory.

 

 

References

Faulkner, R. (1938) ‘Problems in Collage’, Design, 39(9), pp. 16–17. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00119253.1938.10741478.

Janis, H. and Blesh, R. (1962) ‘Call it Collage’, Design, 63(3), pp. 116–121. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00119253.1962.10744181.

Kini-Singh, A. (2023) ‘From Anthropology to Artistic Practice: How Bricolage Has Been Used in the Twentieth Century as an Ideal Model of Engagement with the World’, Journal of Human Values, 29(1), pp. 48–57. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/09716858221130130.

Lippard, L.R. (1962) ‘Ernst and Dubuffet: A Study in like and unlike’, Art Journal, 21(4), pp. 240–245. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/774572.

Saltzman, W. (1952) ‘Creating a Collage’, Design, 53(5), pp. 106–106. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00119253.1952.10743197.

Schechner, R. (1968) ‘6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre’, Architecture/Environment (Spring, 12(3), pp. 41–64. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1144353.

Selz, P. (1963) ‘John Heartfield’s “Photomontages”’, The Massachusetts Review, 4(2), pp. 309–336. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25079020 (Accessed: 25 January 2024).

Wu, L., Wang, D. and Evans, J.A. (2019) ‘Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology’, Nature, 566(7744), pp. 378–382. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-0941-9.