The Weird Ones—Mutable As Glue. Los Raros. Las Raras introduction by Todd Bartel.

Los Raros. Las Raras. New Narratives of Contemporary Collage exhibition had the main goal of showcasing that collage is way more than just cutting and pasting paper. The selection of work included photography, painting, sculpture, performance, music, digital, video and paper. We asked artist and writer Todd Bartel to write an introduction for the exhibition’s catalog to reflect the spirit of the show.

The Weird Ones—Mutable As Glue

Collection n.
3. concrete. A number of objects collected or gathered together, viewed as a whole; a group of things collected and arranged:
3.c. A quantity of anything, as water, which has collected into one mass; an accumulation.

Shape v.
2. a. To make, fashion out of pre-existing materials. In later use, to make by alteration of shape (as by moulding or carving) out of something else; to make in a definite shape.

Κόλλα (kólla) n.
1. glue

Weird n.
3. Of strange or unusual appearance, odd-looking.
mutable as shapes in the weird clouds. ¹

Si ce sont les plumes qui font le plumage, ce n’est pas la colle qui fait le collage. ²
Max Ernst, Beyond Painting, 1948

After a century of global experimentation with collage, the objet trouvé, and the readymade, the apparent strangeness of Max Ernst’s edict is yet only beginning to be appreciated. What did Ernst mean when he wrote, “If it’s the feathers that make the plumage, it’s not the glue that makes the collage”? An initial reading of this oft-quoted truism is perplexing until the reader pushes past the physical means of assembly to realize collage is not a medium but a creative act formed by the nature of the maker’s combination of actions with coupled inclusions and immaterial attachments. 

The type of glue used ultimately influences the meaning of the work, but regarding the three supercategories of binder types—Force-Effective, Material, and Immaterial—it is the immaterial glues that tug at meaning with greater influence: emotional glue, conceptual glue, associative glue, poetic glue, moral glue, and memorial glue, for example, shift meaning toward a different ethos, which in turn, informs any would-be viewer-reader, who is poised to venture into a realm of communication akin to Grangerization—extra-illustration. (In the mid-1700s, the term “illustration” meant “verbal description” until James Granger inadvertently invented the scrapbook by adding blank pages to the backs of his multi-volume “Biographical History of England,” and flash forward to today, illustration is now thought of as a visual accompaniment to written language.) Adding “extra” illustrations was a radical way to crowd-source the enhancement of extant publications. Granger’s books, with their blank pages, ready to receive visual-textual gluings, became a cultural pastime. Moreover, each set of history books bore a unique collection of gluings from one embellished volume to the next. Considering collage now, which by comparison seem like hyper-morphed and merged Grangerizations amplified by every “ism” imaginable, we can more easily appreciate that a collage made with strict conceptual rules is held together differently than a work enfolded with memory, intuition and emotional gesturing or a work made with poetic association. These immaterial mind-based glues give rise to unique essences that heighten the appreciation of any coupling and are further enhanced by the context surrounding each implementation, with its character, juxtaposition, and amplitude.

Material adhesives, or artificial glues, are perfunctory in character, and while physical couplers can add to the general meaning of a thing made or altered (thank you, Marshall McLuhan), they are not as essentially communicative as mind-based glues when it comes to influencing or conveying, references, ideas, messages or symbolism. When we recognize immaterial glue—άυλη κόλλα (áyli kólla)—the collage we see reveals its inherent potency through our empathetic, visual, and literal recognitions. Immaterial glues become legible when we learn to identify the signs and language of each type^{& (See Endnotes “A Note About Glue”)} and how an individual user prompts its audience to recognize their ideas, interests, and imagery. Los Raros. Las Raras. presents hundreds of opportunities to appreciate how contemporary collage-based artists contend with finding, minding, and binding. But a couple more sticky matters need attention before you contend with their marvels.

One hundred and five years ago, the word “collage” first appeared outside the French language in an English book by Wyndham Lewis, The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex?—published byThe Egoist LTD, London, 1919. The word “collage” appears on p. 26 of the first edition and page 52 of the 1986 reprint. The relatively quick adoption of a foreign word into another language was a modern sign of the intrinsic power of collage and how fast it spread throughout the world. Guillaume Apollinaire celebrated collage, pointing out, “It is impossible to foresee all the possibilities, all the tendencies of an art so profound and painstaking.”³ But it is important to keep in mind that before it was named, collage was everywhere expressed as the phenomenological law of the physical universe and thus easily located in all cultural production throughout human history. Collage was not invented by two white Europeans, but Picasso and Braque did ignite a wildfire of modernist interest when they imported readymade quotidian artifacts into the fields of their paintings and drawings to disrupt the time-honored traditions of depicting perspectival volumes and spaces. To borrow Diane Waldman’s word, the modern “revolution” of collage saw the comprehensive fracturing of the traditional picture plane, the expansion, fusion, and blurring between any, if not all, creative practices, not just naturalism, figuration, abstraction, and narrative—the flat, volumetric, environmental and time-based became exploded and turned inside out. Divisions between individuated curricula became blurred and blended. Today, collage is the most democratic of creative acts, capable of balancing any and all sets of elements no matter how contrasting. 

Collection is cohesion. ⁴

While the last century ushered in a ubiquitous diversity of practices—see Katie Blake’s dictionary of collage terms, What Kind of Collage is That?⁵. In truth, anything we humans have done with it is still yet only scratching the surface of college’s omnipotence. Collage is, after all, the preeminent shapeshifter. Like water, it is unavoidable, changes form and states regularly, is in everything, everywhere, and is often invisible or undetectable despite its presence. Collage is all coalescence and disseverance—before and after the Big Bang. There are far more things to combine than humans have time to play with or otherwise have access to gather. Recently captured on film, for example, the first direct image of a supermassive black hole—Messier 87 captured by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017 and released as an image to the general public on April 10, 2019—provided the first glimpse of an ubercollage ⁶ in existence long before Earth was formed. It is unfathomable to ponder its celestial admixture, but consider this, “it would take just over 2.98 million Earths lined up in a row to span the length of M87*⁷. Thus, the true nature of collage is always based upon a strange, maker-idiosyncratic gravitational attraction of elements—and here on Earth, that depends, of course, upon the elements used, be they originating in the analog and/or virtual state/s, inside and/or outside the practitioner’s workplace. Thus, while collage is emancipated from being locked into any singular prospect, we sometimes have to ward off the tendency to presuppose collage as only its predominant model. 

Notwithstanding all the variety and possibility, the fact that the French word “collage” derives from the Greek word “κόλλα” (kólla—”glue, flour paste”), the definition is nevertheless not held to its strictest and paradoxically most versatile meaning as often as it ought to be. Indeed, the word collage is too often defined or thought of first as an object assembled with glued paper. In spite of the glorious preeminence of papier collé and decoupage, collage’s potential is severely diminished when the term’s definition is relegated to these possibilities. To emphasize this point another way, the etymology of “gluing” does not require nor exclude the possibility of treeware or vegetable fiber; it embraces ALL possibilities, not just those particular materials. There is no mention of materials other than glue in the original definition. Thus, collage needs to be recognized for its unique combination of mind-based coupling. Keep in mind Ernst’s proclamation and the message of this essay: the immaterial makes the collage, and it happens in the viewer’s minds. Collage is thus always new and transformational and because of shifting contexts, it can never be repeated even when it pretends to copy and appropriate—hense the not-uncommon experience of encountering weird and unexpected joinery: Los Raros! Las Raras! 

At times, however, collage can be so thoroughly seamless that we fail to recognize the parts and the glue holding it all together as a collage in the first place. The appropriate term for such intellectual coupling or seamless unison is uncollage ⁸. Uncollages—as in, not glued physically—are collages in which the collected imagery is so thoroughly embedded or otherwise referenced that we fail to recognize the constituent parts as collage. Digital collages, for example, with all their inherent layers of virtual pastings, are blended even if they appear to be obviously disjunctive. The light-backed screen we are accustomed to viewing them on equalizes the overall fused imagery, and the printed examples are rendered smooth and uniform in ink. Such fusion hides, removes, or masks the work’s dependency upon initial collection. Consider that all digital collages are uncollages, but not all uncollages are digital. The portraits of Arcimboldo offer a fantastic example of a seamless unison of flora and fauna that constitute the likenesses of various individuals, while the painted surfaces yield no evidence of composite layering due to the smoothed single surfaces in his paintings. Uncollage is but one example of the variety of collages brought under one roof from near and far by the curators of this exhibition. Overall, Los Raros. Las Raras. showcases a penchant for genre-combining, including but not limited to abstract cartoon, illustration/photo cross-embedding, rollage insertion, embroidered printmaking, remnant abstraction, interlocking collage or paper marquetry, and emerging collage standards such as Froissage, pixel/mosaic/puzzle, and steampunk, to name a few. And then there are those categories we don’t have words for yet, but Cless and Máximo Tuja refer to as: “Collaged Graffiti, Street art + Dada, Painting + Sci-FI + Pop, Abstraction + Disney, Photography, Performance + Collage, Digital art + painting, Toy Collecting + Photography, Entomology + Classic Portraiture, Photography + Sculpture, Bauhaus on Acid, and, Gardening + Pop.” ⁹

Curators Cless and Máximo Tuja have assembled a contemporary collage landscape comprising 472 works from 96 artists hailing from 19 countries that all in some way reflect the human experience. In short, Los Raros. Las Raras. illuminates the present state of post-naturalism as sometimes fractured, simultaneous, and multi-perspectival and at other times as situationally liminal and hybrid. As Cless points out,

It’s incredible how many artists there are doing work that looks like collage but doesn’t pretend to be collage. Art evolves at breakneck speed. The rules of the game have not only changed or are updated quickly, but they are elevated to the nth power. Everything and every style is mixed. There are no longer formulas or recipes; we improvise and take risks. We break with the established more quickly and systematically; we try and accept mistakes, giving them a new meaning. The strange and the weird are at the top of the game board. Hey! The ugly duckling is not so ugly now and has its audience, folks! ¹⁰

The beguiling temperament of Los Raros. Las Raras. can be further characterized by their episodic and arbitrary inclusions, their distant couplers, and their irreverent, if not pointed, and lucid pairings. Naturalism today as Los Raros. Las Raras. demonstrates is met with an all-out fervor for non-judgmental whatever. Do not mistake Los Raros. Las Raras. placid anarchy for a lack of intellectual or emotional rigor. Los Raros. Las Raras. is sobering, direct, and unflinching. As Máximo Tuja points out, the work in the exhibition is not strange for the sake of being strange—the work is not retinal, to borrow Duchamp’s disavowal—it is critical first, and it’s strange second:

The term “weird” often carries a connotation of inherent value, but I disagree. For me, the merit of an artwork doesn’t lie only in its eccentricity. The truly intriguing “weird” arises when it confronts established traditions and mainstream definitions. It starts a dialogue with the past, proposing a fresh perspective on the familiar…This liminal space, where established definitions become ambiguous, is where I find the most compelling artistic expression. ¹¹

Los Raros. Las Raras. celebrates the cacophony of collecting, shaping, combining, and embracing the unexpected. And regarding the weird, ugly duckling in the room, remember the words of Albert Einstein:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and science.¹²

Todd Bartel
Weston, MA, April 10, 2024

¹ Oxford English Dictionary, entomological example from Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), Alastor; or, The spirit of solitude: and other poems, London, 1816, p. 31

² Max Ernst, Max Ernst: Beyond Painting and Other Writings, Ed. Robert Motherwell, The Documents of Modern Art 7, Wittenborn, Schultz, New York, 1948, p. 13

³ Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913, Picasso et les papiers Collés, found in Picasso in Perspective, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1976, p. 50.

⁴ First appeared in Kolaj magazine #28, 2020

⁵ Whatapageturner Press, Eagle River, Alaska, 2023 Note: Todd Bartel presented over 80 different types of collage in defense of premiering his neologism “uncollage” at the first Kolaj Fest in New Orleans, LA in July of 2018.

⁶ Todd Bartel claimed this designation within the first hour of the release of this first M87 image. See @collagehead April 10, 2019.

⁷  https://futurism.com/the-byte/big-m87-black-hole-compared-the-earth, retrieved, April 6, 2024. “*Thankfully, M87 is about 55 million light years away—so while we could readily fit inside its gaping maw, we’re way too far to get sucked in.”

⁸ See Todd Bartel, uncollage articles in Kolaj magazine, Kolaj #s 25, 26, 27, 28, 34, 35, 2019-22

⁹  Máximo Tuja April 10, 2024 email

¹⁰  Cless March 26, 2024 email

¹¹  Máximo Tuja March 23, 2024 email

¹²  Albert Einstein, What I Believe, Forum, vol. LXXXIV, No.4, October 1930

A Note About Glue

Over the past three decades, I have collected and organized binder types in an effort to eradicate misconceptions about the “apparent easiness” or “laziness of collage-making.” To the best of my knowledge and experience, there are basic supercategories, each with its own subcategories:

• Context/Access
• Nature-based Glues (Force-Based and Nature Material-based)
• Artificial Glues/Synthetic Fasteners (Material Glues)
• Mind-based Glues (Immaterial Glue)

1. Contextual Glue (Access & Collection)

© Todd Bartel 1996, updated 2024