Collage


 * Collage** is an art form made popular by artists such as Pablo Picasso and Carlo Carrà, and authors, such as F. T. Marinetti and William Carlos Williams. Collage composes a piece of art from other pre-existing materials or other pieces. It is a technique that first appeared in the 1100's and has remained popular over the centuries.

=Definition=

Collage is an artistic technique involving the use of multiple image-pieces being put together to form a cohesive whole. These image-pieces can be from photos, paintings, or any other visual medium that contributes to the artist's vision. It comes from the French word, //coller,// which means "to glue," and often the creative process involves, quite literally, gluing two things together. In literature, collage can take the form of visual word picture, but collage also manifests itself in the work of Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams in the way in which both writers juxtapose words that sometimes seemingly do not go together. Collage is often indeterminate in nature and sometimes relies on compositional meaning to convey thoughts.

=History=

The art of collage has been around almost as long as paper itself, but it has undergone some changes throughout history. The first known example of collage still around today is the work of Japanese calligraphers during the 12th century. They would glue images onto paper to create backgrounds for their calligraphy which continued as an art form, showing up in many different cultures. During the 19th century, however, it's use shifted to inside the home. Before the 20th century, collage was mostly considered a popular art or a sort of hobby. People would make Valentine's cards by gluing hearts together, or housewives would make collages of family photos to give to relatives as gifts on Christmas. Initially, collage was not an art form that was taken seriously by any real artists. However, in the 20th century, Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque incorporated collage into their work, opening the doors for a new art form. The painting to the right titled "Still-Life with Chair Caning" is considered by some to be the first piece of modern collage. Picasso utilized oil cloth in this painting, which is a cheap fabric with a pattern printed on it. The oil cloth he used had a pattern of chair caning on it, which he then glued to the canvas and painted over. Oil cloth had only been used by Braque shortly before Picasso used it in his own work. It was not yet accepted in the art world for proper artists to use "found objects" in their pieces, but Picasso challenged that assumption with this piece, making his art a sort of "garbage." Collage helped Picasso prove a point that painting can be juxtaposed with any material and that art doesn't have to be uniform and conventional.

For the Cubists it was an ideal art form because they could anger critics with their use of non-paint materials, in their "paintings." It was a way of rebelling against the constraints and conventions of traditional painting. Cubists and other Modern Artists after them could use the collage to create new realities by juxtaposing materials that usually have no place together. One of the principles of making collages is taking materials out of their elements and re-purposing them, and putting them next to other materials that don't belong together.

=‍Major Artists=

As previously mentioned, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were among the first to incorporate collage into high art. Many other Dadaists, Futurists, and various other experimental groups experimented with collage, and it was eventually incorporated into postmodern literature as well.



Collage in Painting
"Interventionist Demonstration (Patriotic Holiday-Freeword Painting) (Manifestazione interventista [Festa patriottica-dipinto parolibero]), 1914 by Carlo Carra' is an example of collage in Futurist painting.

This is a piece of work by Carlo Carrà that perfectly exhibits collage. It is composed of tempera, pen, mica powder, and paper glued on cardboard. If you look closely, you can see what appears to snippits of newspaper articles, Italian flags, and an occasional phrase such as "Parole in Liberta," which translates to "Words-in-Freedom".

The image resembles both an inward spiral and an explosion. One way to see the piece is to picture a busy street in France and see a bomb suddenly go off and there are scraps of newspaper flying everywhere. This image seems violent in nature; often collage involves a violent ripping of materials from their original contexts, especially if the piece is meant as a critique against war. This re-purposing within Modern Art was a wild departure from collage's previous place within the home and domesticity.



Collage in Literature
An even more modern form of Collage in Literature gaining prominence is Black-Out Poetry.Black-Out Poetry is a type of Found Poetry in which the writer takes a pre-existing piece of writing, and blacks out large sections to make their own poem or picture.

What is left behind is an all new poem, with influences from the original piece, but the new poem has its own character and meaning. Although often in the form of poetry, Black-Out Poetry can also be incorporated into visual art, like in the picture to the right. This particular example fits both within the categories of poetry and visual arts.

In fact, many forms of collage found in literature blur the boundaries between written and visual art. These forms of literature do utilize the written word, but the authors of these works often rip the words from their origins, flip up them upside down, change their fonts, or render them illegible, as in F.T. Marinetti's work.



F.T. Marinetti
F. T. Marinetti is an author who displays collage in his writing.

This particular page was created for The Futurist Manifesto in 1909. It contains words and yet still makes a sort of picture. The image resembles a battle scene or a car crash, but in general it seems to be an image of war, like Carra's piece above.

Gertrude Stein
Stein's //Tender Buttons// seems to intrinsically mix violent and familiar objects. There are mixed messages about how to read her poems. Firstly, one could read it as though "tender" means "hurt," in which case the poems could be interpreted as acts of violence and expressions of hurt within language. On the other hand "tender" could mean "affectionate" or "endearing," in which case her poems could be read as familiar, homey, and sweet. Part of the confusing interpretation is its indeterminate nature.

"//A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.//

//A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.//"

-excerpt from Gertrude Stein's //Tender Buttons//

Collage in William Carlos Williams' //Spring and All://
It could be argued that Collage techniques appear throughout this text by Williams. Often times he will have extreme and almost off-putting cuts from prose into poetry. For example, the poem entitled //VI// is several stanzas long and expresses the linguistics of language in an almost romantic fashion. Then suddenly, and the end of one stanza, he cuts out of the poem and begins writing in prose:

"which only to have done nothing, can make perfect

The Inevitable flux of the seeing eye toward measuring itself by the world it inhabits can only make results in himself crushing humiliation unless the individual raise to some approximate co-extension with the universe."

One could consider this a type of violence done to language. It is certainly a jarring style for a reader to follow, to be immersed in the flow and cadence of a poem, only to be ripped away by the unsubtle nature of a full paragraph.

=Differentiation from Montage ‍=

Montage is similar to collage, but it originated in film. While collage is usually a static image, montage usually involves movement and tiny bits of narrative. So, in short, montage moves and collage stays still.

=External Links=

Horkay Istavan -- Museum Factory

=References=

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