By Leonardo Sousa
“You’re using the wrong word, Mr Gluck, Elisabeth said. The word you’re using is for when you cut out pictures of things or colored shapes and stick them on paper.
I disagree, Daniel said. Collage is an institute of education where all the rules can be thrown into the air, and size and space and time and foreground and background all become relative, and because of these skills everything you know gets made into something new and strange.”
Autumn – Ali Smith
Thinking about collage requires an understanding of the word and its definition. It goes beyond the boundaries of a simple process of cutting and pasting things together. It is more than a technique developed and used by the vanguards of the 20th century to break the rules of academic painting and bring the everyday life into the canvas; or even a child’s play. I intend to establish that collage is an action, a methodology of thought, a way of looking at and understanding the world and everyday life as fragments that this action deconstructs and reorganizes. If we look around, we can see collage in everything that surrounds us. Not everything is necessarily glued, in a physical sense, although still remains clustered in a way or another; in that case how can we define this process of pasting? To begin, the understanding of this process, I suggest an examination of the word definition, as well as other artistic techniques.
Collage
noun [ C or U ](the art of making) a picture in which various materials or objects, for example paper, cloth, or photographs, are stuck onto a larger surface. ( CAMBRIDGE DICTIONARY – [online] [2003] [Consult. 2023-05-26] disponível em https://www.infopedia.pt/dicionarios/lingua-portuguesa/colagem)
I consider this dictionary definition quite limited to define the concept. Sets aside a lot of techniques and procedures that are not brought forth by these means. Of course, in a historical contextual sense, collage is linked to the idea of cutting and pasting, however can exist without these two actions. Etymologically, the word suggests the action of cutting and pasting because the origin of the term comes from French colle – which derives from the Greek κολλα – that means glue. But in the French grammar, it can also mean a question or enigma, and in slang it can be used to refer to a person who copies. This is interesting because this artistic technique proceeds the appropriation of something that already exists. In the artistic context, this technique involves the agglomeration of different existing elements chosen by the artist. These elements may include printed text from a newspaper or magazine, colored paper, which can have different textures, or even objects and different materials, that are restructured and inserted in another context or surface, creating a new image. Collage can have numerous meanings and words that can also be used to denote it, mainly in the artistic context. Looking back at recent art history, we can find several words that have been used to characterize and distinguish different techniques.
When, at the beginning of the 20th century, Braque and Picasso created what was considered the first artistic collages, they were called papier collé, a French term that literally means paper collage. Papiers collé are collages made-up of pieces of paper, magazine clippings, drawings, fabrics integrated into the same two-dimensional surface mixed with drawing or painting in gouache or oil. Cut-out papers offered the possibility of creating textures or modifying classic perspective points and creating the illusion of trompe-l’oeil. However, the development of this technique brought many other possibilities within artistic production and collage abandoned the two-dimensionality and began to integrate three-dimensional materials and objects such as wood, rope, cardboard and utilitarian objects.
In this case, when we want to define the artistic technique that presents these characteristics, we can use the word assemblage to refer to these artistic works. Thisis a French term inserted in the artistic context by Jean Dubuffet in 1953 to define mainly collages with three-dimensional objects and materials. Assemblage made use of waste and everyday materials, including dirt, rags and twigs, with the intention of challenging and disrupting the values of the commercialized contemporary gallery system. The technique also came to be quite used by Surrealist artists who created artworks using unlikely combinations of found objects. The use of unusual objects made it possible to create surprising and disturbing sculptures inspired by the psychology of the unconscious and Sigmund Freud’s dreams.
The introduction of object and material collage in painting, which were not typically used in the visual arts, opened up a vast range of possibilities for exploring new techniques and procedures. This eventually led to the emergence of Dadaist ready-mades. According to Louis Aragon, collage brought about the annulment of the painter’s gesture and the brushstroke. The hand gesture was no longer identified and the painter no longer needed to mix colours, as these had been replaced by the use of paper cutouts. The artist would only have to assemble these fragments imitating the technique of painting on canvas. In this case, it was the painter´s responsibility, as in collage, to select the materials. The act of creating became the choice of objects, annulling the useful function through the context in which it was exposed, the gallery or museum and giving it a title and a new meaning. And this is a collage procedure, so ready-made could be added to collage definition.
In 1918 the artist Kurt Schwitters (based on dadaism vanguard) began to use scavenged scrap materials to create his artworks. Schwitters became widely known for his collages comprised of discarded everyday objects, such as bus tickets, wallpaper, newspapers, playing cards, fabrics, among many other items. Whether these materials were string, cotton, or a baby carriage wheel, he regarded them as equally valuable for artistic work as paint. He named his own technique ‘merz’. Merz is a nonsense word invented by Kurt Schwitters to describe his own art technique based on scavenged scrap materials. This term was taken from the name Commerzbank, which appeared written on a paper fragment used in one of his collages.
But Schwitters’ masterpiece is Merzbau. This architectural construction located in his own house, where he built about forty caves connected to the interior of the building and even extending to exterior through windows. This construction can also be called Bricollage, which means building or creating works of art made from any readily available material and non-traditional art materials. Some examples are the artists who were part of the arte povera movement (which included Mario Merz) and the contemporary French artist Laure Prouvost.
In the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, assemblage became widely used, and with the various approaches of the avant-gardes, different terms also emerged to classify collage based on their distinct characteristics and techniques. Décollage is a French word meaning literally to unstick, generally associated with the process used by artists of the Nouveau Réalism movement that involved making art from posters ripped off the walls. This artistic movement founded in 1960 by the artist Yves Klein and the critic Pierre Restany, included artists such as Mimmo Rotella, Jacques Villeglé or Raymond Hains who used recycled everyday materials such as advertising posters, redefining the paradigm of collage and ready-made that characterized the post-war artistic approach through collage based on subtraction. These artists took off the posters accumulated on the walls of the city streets, intervening with the various layers, cutting them, tearing them or removing parts of the image, creating a new one through destruction. This innovative technique was called Décollage and this new term was coined to designate collages created by subtraction through tearing and cutting of the original image.
In the same period, an artist emerged and broke the stylistic and conceptual dominance of the Abstract Expressionists and expanded the horizons of art. That was Robert Rauschenberg and his work literally crossed beyond the dimensions of canvas into three-dimensional art. Rauschenberg is perhaps best known for his Combines – a hybrid between painting and sculpture. His Combines challenged the gestural abstract painting and the two-dimensional canvases, and this innovation cemented him as a main figure of the American avant-garde. Each of his pieces confronted tradition styles through the use of found objects, graphic and cultural imagery, and sculptural arrangement. Most objects that he incorporated into his Combines were found during the artist’s walks around the city, this wasted material was transformed into art by his hands. Rauschenberg reinvented collage, taking quotidian materials and turning them into something, thus creating the illusion of a unitary meaning.
Moving forward, in 1970, female artists and activists Miriam Shapiro and Melissa Meyer came up with a new term to define the peculiar characteristics of their works. The use of techniques attributed to women’s tasks and domestic to create art. Activities as they were practiced by women using traditional women’s techniques like sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, cooking activities also engaged in by men but assigned in History to women. This designation contains, in addition to the technical definition, a social reference. Femmage is used only to mention the artistic practice of the female gender, which develops an artistic work based on the tasks associated with women’s domestic work.
In addition to the mentioned cases, there were many others; the development of artistic technique in art led to new etymological terms to classify the different characteristics of it. A increasing the number of new words that distinguished and included the specificities of this expanding technique. Etymological new variations have been created to designate the technique depending on the type of cut used. For instance, Czech artist Jiri Kolář used a collage technique based on clippings of words or small identical images to create patterns that became known as Chiasmage. The works of this artist, although technically consisting of two-dimensional paper collages, similar to those used in papier collé, gained their own nomenclature for being made up only of patterns created only by words or several equal elements. Likewise, Crumblage is used to refer to works whose technique consists of collaging crumpled paper to deform the original image. There is also a term used to refer to collages made in other media, such as painting, that apparently are not collage. Uncollage is a term invented by Todd Bartel to describe the combination of several sources of images appropriated and painted in a cohesive way, leaving no traces of their different origins. Thinking about the technique outside the analogical practice and observing the image manipulation processes in digital through editing software programs such as photoshop, we get a new variant of the technique and a new nomenclature. Photocollage, or digital collage, refers to collages made using digital software. Image editing programs make use of the technique procedures by replacing the manual elements of scissors with a combination of hardware, software and key commands, the CTRL+C and CTRL+V commands (copy and paste). This technique has a lot of similarities with that used by the Dadaists in 1915 and by the Russian Constructivists in 1923 used as a means of expressing political dissent, but in an analogous way called Photomontage. They used photomontage as a way to create impactful socially engaged images reconstructed from the media to protest political issues. This term can also be replaced by Montage, although montage often emphasizes the arrangement of visual elements based on a particular theme or concept. It brings together, almost formally, several images referring to the same theme.
The ramifications of the word within its technical versatility can almost be endless. There is a wide range of terms, actions and techniques in which collage can unfold and include, and each of these peculiarities, can have a new nomenclature and definition.
The definition and the concept becomes, then, very broad and with different meanings depending on the word used, the technique, the language or context in which it is referred. From my perspective, this is very interesting in relation to collage, how it manages to gather in itself so many definitions and techniques and how throughout the History of Art, it has been changing, expanding and redefining through its artistic exploration. It is exciting the range of prospects that collage practices manifest itself. As well as the infinite possibilities that the technique offers, the word COLLAGE is versatile and includes all previous nomenclatures and techniques in itself. But if collage has all these different ways of being practiced, with or without glue, different materials, physical or digital, what really defines collage, how can we identify or define it? Does it happen outside of artistic technique? Is it an action or a way of thinking? My intent is to propose a definition of collage beyond the technique and discover how to identify and circumscribe it. What if we think of it as an action or thought? THAT will bring us a larger definition and a lot of new words to our Collage Dictionary.
Leonardo Sousa graduated in Fine Arts and obtained his Master’s degree in Painting in 2021 from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, where he presented a dissertation entitled “An Idea of Collage – The Construction of a Reality from Fragments.”
He dedicates his artistic research to the conceptual understanding of collage and develops his artistic practice based on the theoretical idea that collage is the construction of reality from fragments. His artistic methodology has become almost an ethnographic or archaeological practice, where his artistic works in different techniques question the concept of collage through the appropriation of different personal references.
