Text by Robert Voigts
I have been an art raw material collector ever since I went off to university to study art in 1971. Back then I used to wander the campus and find discarded objects. I would appropriate (lift) them and haul them back to my dorm room, much to the dismay of my roommate. I discovered Marcel Duchamp my second year and became obsessed with his conceptual approach. I was very influenced by his Readymades. There was something irresistible to me about using mundane objects and imbuing them with a magical significance, beauty and humor. I couldn’t imagine anything more elegant than “Bicycle Wheel” or more hilarious than “In Advance of the Broken Arm.“
Years later I had a modest collection of objects, papers and ephemera. I kept them in a long green cardboard box with 3 drawers. My 2 little sons loved to look at the objects inside. They called it my “collection box”. Looking back, now, I see that I was still enthralled by the idea of everyday objects set aside, elevated to some higher status by selection.
I did collage from about 1977 to 1982. I got married and started a family and my focus shifted. I started a graphic design business and took a thirty-eight-year break from fine art. In 2020 during the pandemic I started experimenting with digital collage. And in 2022 I finally returned to analog collage. My initial idea was to use every day printed materials. Things that were culturally, almost transparent, mass produced and ubiquitous. Product packaging found its way into my house from all directions. Perfect, I thought. I loved all the printer’s marks, scoring, and the beautiful saturated color. Around this time, I also started using junk mail of all kinds. There was something appealing about the sweaters and shoes laid out on the pages of high-end catalogs. It reminded me of my childhood spent looking at Montgomery Ward catalogs (not high end) for hours and dreaming. The more bland it was the better. It was a challenge to create something beautiful from a UPS customer manual or a Delta Airlines Mileage Club mailer. Old graphic design magazines were very beautiful when torn up. Manufacturing product catalogs with tables were a favorite. By this time my old stash resurfaced. This material I had collected all those years ago and never used, had a fresh life and got stirred in with the current material accumulating in my studio. I loved the mix of old and new. I began to develop a visual language that tried to make sense of my experience with the Readymades. I even used some of my old collages that were gathering dust in a bin. I cut them up and used the pieces in new work.
I’ve been doing collage for the past 2 years using this “old and new” process. One of my continuing battles is finding a substrate that doesn’t warp too much. I had seen the technique of using hardcover books as a base to build a collage. Wondering where I could find lots of cheap books, I realized all Goodwill stores usually have a books-and-records section. I loved the idea of using this raw material, mass curated by American culture and on exhibit in these “museums,” all across the country, every day of the week, 9:00 am to 7:00 pm. I’ve now completed three sets of series using this appropriated material.
The stuff I buy from the Goodwill store brings a certain poignancy to a collage. The items have a goofy, overlooked and unwanted feeling about them. In a Goodwill store you see the harsh realities of consumer culture, the logical extension of the trickle-down theory. The Goodwill store seems like the last stop before the landfill. So, I rescue a few items and use them in collages and, hopefully, scratch that itch I felt years ago when I first encountered “Fountain” by Duchamp and “Bed” by Rauschenberg.
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Robert Voigts, cred IT{ch;(eck-
