(OR THROUGH, OR AGAINST)

And here we are in 2011. Nice to see you, as always. These past weeks I have had collage and de-collage on my mind. Below I have retyped and pasted in sections from a passage in Collage: The Making of Modern Art, by Brandon Taylor. That is the book that I have delaminated for the NewLights (De)Collage, and yes, all of the text is gone from my copy. But the text is still there in my other copy—I liked the book so much that I got two, knowing that one would be made into something entirely different. That book is the best broad survey of collage that I have read, and one of the main reasons for that is that it includes really interesting European artists (like Jiři Kolář, described in the passage below) that I had never heard of before reading the book. [Note: the book from which these passages were taken is a British book, hence the single quotes, etc.]


Jiři Kolář
Story, 1952
A confrontage.

[…]

It was not until the end of the 1950s however that [Jiři] Kolář embarked on the vast experiment with the divided image for which he has become justly celebrated since. In a curious historical parallel, it was in the first years of French Lettrisme that Kolář’s unique experiment with the verbal image began, first as a ‘cut-up’ technique applied to given items of printed matter ranging from labels, recipes, mathematical formulae, and texts on medicine and astrology: such poems were collectively called ‘Instructions for Use’ and immediately endeared Kolář to concrete poetry movements further west. ‘From the beginning’, Kolář has said, ‘my concern was to find the interfaces between the fine arts and literature. All previous attempts in this direction seemed inadequate, and above all not consistent’. Imprisoned for most of 1953 and officially debarred from publishing until 1964, he nevertheless created from 1961-2 entire series of sign-poems, number-poems, puzzle-poems, and eventually ‘silent’ poems composed of hyphens, question-marks, commas and other resources of the typewriter (some were dedicated to the memory of Malevich). Soon came object-poems, or things subjected to essentially literary structures such as repetition, rhyming, or inter-leaving, or books themselves which are ruined, torn or glued, as if evading the censor of his poetry by craftily switching into another medium. ‘Someday’, said Kolář, ‘it will become possible to make poetry out of anything at all’.

Jiři Kolář
Baudelaire (Les Fleurs Du Mal) Series, 1972
I believe that this is a rollage, because it is made from two copies of the same image. One is inverted, which creates the strange mirroring-repetition.

[…]

In prollage (another invented term) he takes two or more images, and having cut them into identical width strips reassembles them in sequence: prollage stretches images lengthways, giving a behind-bars appearance that is also a simultaneity-effect whose purpose is to tease the mind and the eye. A variation known as rollage (from 1964) meant cutting several copies of the same image into strips and then mounting them in staggered sequence, creating a dazzling ‘optical’ effect not unlike Op Art in the West. ‘My head was bursting when I realized the possibilities which opened up for me when I put together the first two reproductions for the first time. I was permeable and so was the whole world; a non-illusionistic space could be created…’.

[…]

‘Rollage has enabled me to see the world in at least two dimensions’, he has said; ‘the stratifications made me realise just how many unknown layers make up life and just how many unknown deposits exist within each of us’.

[…]

Not trained as an artist, he has seldom invented a line or cut a silhouette that was not already given in the image in front of him—this too confirms his status as a writer for whom ‘poetry’ resides in images that resemble, dissemble, repeat or inhabit each other, and perhaps never more so than in the recent series known as intercollage which exploits the Magritte-effect of silhouetting one reality into (or through, or against) another

[…]

True to his writer’s mission, Kolář compiled a Dictionary of Methods, published in Paris in 1986, in which he articulates all the other techniques of his invention such as ventillage, crumplage, kinetic collage, and which underline further still his affinity to conceptual classification, lexicography, systematization, seriality: not only an implacably anti-Romantic attitude to the image, but one attuned to the linguistic as such. ‘The world attacks us directly’, he has said, ‘tears us apart through the experience of the most incredible events, and assembles and reassembles us again. Collage is the most appropriate medium to illustrate this reality’.

[…]

Jiři Kolář
Cow Having Eaten Up Canaletto, 1968
An intercollage.

Full Citation!
Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 181-186.