Oysters of the Id: Experiencing Collage

Bradley Eros
December 2016

Collage is a portal to the unknown.  Its supreme quality is mystery. Poetic accident guides the hand. Surprise and the uncanny are the scissors & glue. New thoughts are cut and pasted. It’s an invention to disorient and reveal; a puzzle that asks the unanswered questions.

Material is and isn’t what it is. All possibilities are possible, but only certain impossibilities may reveal themselves, fleetingly, to the collagist, and must be seized upon at that very instant, or they may slip away, forever. Mystery in the process and the result which come after years of exploration, and often present themselves in a flash and are gone.

Transformation is the key, but multiple planes of existence are essential: opening perception, altering reality, changing matter. These are the result of synaptic links revealed in novel combinations, that may forever change your perception of that image, these materials, those elements. Who knows what may happen when you experiment: It may blow up in your face!  Or melt your mind. You must be risky, intuitive or clairvoyant.

Collage is a laboratory: a microscope & a telescope of the unconscious universe. It is an operating table, a surgical bed, a petri dish, a fork in the road, and an alchemical oven for distilling and transmuting matter.

Synesthesia is essential: crossing or confusing the senses. Fashioning works to evoke other realms, as eyes become fingertips, like hieroglyphs or pictographs, you’re meant to hear sound or music when you gaze upon them. A scent may waft from a perfumed ode, as a taste may graze the tongue at the sight of a spectral structure. Invocations are optic triggers & elixirs, meant to combine channels in a cocktail of sensations.

To be a composer, a fabricator, an assembler of images and materials, may require as much restraint in composition, as much negation, or subtraction as additive action. To remove rather than to join. What not to do & when not to do it. Sometimes less and something less, is more. To cut out. To erase. To de-compose. To eliminate. Void as a gesture.

The practice of making an arrangement can be a meditation, similar to a calligrapher or Zen archer, preceded by an extended period of non-activity and focus, then, like a crouching tiger, leaping quickly with precision, to create a form. To strike a blow, make a mark, to cut, slice, alter, paste or glue, to fix a moving target, where arranging = blooming.

“To flower an arrangement as one would arrange flowers.”

With collage, as with all art, one must be free to explore and experiment with all possible elements, as any and all material are game: accept no restrictions or inhibitions! Steal freely, but transform: images personal and cultural, political, religious, racial, sexual, commercial, popular and private, debased and exalted, revered and discredited, pornographic and iconic, forbidden, banned, or taboo, subtle, obscure, blatant, gross, resonant and clichéd, constrained & excessive, maximal & minimal, meaningful & meaningless.

Often the materials themselves speak: texture, shape, color, surface, weave, reflection, absorption, heavy, light, dense, translucent, shiny, opaque, distressed, stained, aged, pristine. And the spaces between forms: negative spaces, absences, voids, openings, can dominate a composition, calling attention to the material and its surroundings.

A major approach to collage is to assemble like things and unlike things, to use analogy, metaphor, suggestion, and to rhyme shapes, colors and patterns, as a kind of frozen montage or arrested rhythm, that creates an electric shock to the eye from the dissonance or vibration of contrasting information, forms, or meanings.

Over-determined and meticulously planned designs or arrangements can fail horribly, dead on the page. Agit-prop (agitational-propaganda) and social-political critiques usually function (however well intended) as advertisements for psychic clichés, as disposable as other products, despite their anti-consumerist, post-commodity ethos.

To make one final thing clear: Yes, even plagiarism is game. Stealing and looting! Stealing culture back from the thieves of capital, or, in art-world terms: Appropriation. Be “Robinhoodlums of Art”, by re-contextualizing the folk & pop-culture methodology of “invention.” By mixology & regeneration.  Transformation through the re-splicing of art’s DNA.

Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It holds tight an author’s phrase, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, and replaces it with just the right idea. 

  – Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), Poésies II (1870)

Ideas ex-per-i-en-c-ing  c / o / l / l / a / g / e, using material that is found, appropriated, recycled, stolen, plagiarized (of both known and unknown sources), détourned, repurposed, manipulated, altered, as well as original, given, or borrowed images, drawings, photographs, illustrations, diagrams, charts, maps, documents, paintings, posters, postcards, commercial pictures, headshots, graphic designs, typography, script, hand writing, foreign languages & characters from magazines, newspapers, books, encyclopedias, catalogs, comics, yearbooks, textbooks, cook books, science & other journals (medical, biology, zoology, geology, mineralogy, astronomy, microscopy…), advertising, fashion, textiles, furniture, interior design, architecture, art, music, dance, theater, film, television, pornography, advertising (perfumes, appliances, automobiles, alcohol, tobacco, food, candy, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, jewelry, clothing, toys, electronics, games, decorations…), including animals, bodies, faces, landscapes, buildings, interiors, machines, originating from sources such as: National Geographic, Scientific American, Encyclopedia Britannica, The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Life,  Look, Playboy, Dover Books, & The Book of Wonder, et al…

Using myriad formal approaches, including: slicing, ripping, tearing, scratching, creasing, folding, crinkling, wrinkling, crumpling, erasing, smearing, staining, rubbing, stretching, destroying, singeing, burning, puncturing, scotch taping, masking taping, cutting out shapes & figures, over-laying, isolating, inverting, reversing, subtracting, removing, painting on, writing on, drawing on, adding color, abstract shapes & patterns, using mixed media transparencies, gels, metallic, white-out, inks, silhouettes, textures, & objects such as: plants, flowers, insects, feathers, fur, snakeskin, coins, wood, metal, plastic, cloth, glass, mirror, foil, cardboard, wax, minerals, film, slides, x-rays, labels, wallpaper, napkins, playing cards, stamps, tape, vinyl, leather, hair… to obscure or juxtapose the image or design…

Employing tropes & influences from a plethora of historical & personal inspirations, including: Dada & Surrealism, Situationist, Futurist, Constructivist, Arte Povera, Fluxus, Beat, Cut-up, Pop, Punk, Psychedelic,

Musique Concréte, Art Brut, Noise, Mixed-Tape, Minimalism, Austrian Actionists, Occult, Alchemical, Mysticism, Erotic, Graphic Novel & Comix, Photomontage, Japanese & Eastern European Posters, Album Cover Art, Magazine & Book Covers, Zines, Sci-Fi, Mail Art, Satire, Parody, Critique, Agit-Prop, Lyrical & Poetic, Accident & Chance…

Collagists & assemblageists, working with paper, photo, object, film, or sound, including, but not limited to, these inspirations: Ernst, Duchamp, Cornell, Man Ray, Picabia, Heartfield, Schwitters, Hannah Höch, Magritte, Dali, Dubuffet, Picasso, Braque, Malevich, Motherwell, Hans Bellmer, Alberto Burri, Guy Debord, George Maciunas, Conner, Berman, Jess, Ray Johnson, Richard Hamilton, Romare Bearden, John Cage, Harry Smith,  Burroughs, Gysin, Beuys, Rauchenberg, Kleinholtz, Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Polke, Schnabel, Peter Blake, Baldessari, Moholy-Nagy, Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Mimmo Rotella, Martha Rosler, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Daniel Spoerri, Nitsch, Schwarzkogler, Brus, Kren, Godard, Makavejev, Jodorowsky, Brothers Quay, Svankmajer, Toyen, Jindñch Štyrskÿ,  Heisler, Karel Teige, Georges Hugnet, Dave McKean, Bill Sienkiewicz, Raoul Hausmann, de Chirico, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry,  Stockhausen, Varèse, Berio, Morricone, Raymond Scott, Carl Stalling, Zappa, Beefheart, Sun Ra, Nurse With Wound, Genesis P-Orridge, Tex Avery,  Ernie Kovacs, Soupy Sales, Spike Jones, Arthur Lipsett, Terry Gilliam, Méliès, Anger, Brakhage, Dziga Vertov, Santiago Alvarez, Winsor McCay, Fleischer Brothers, Craig Baldwin, Chick Strand, Lewis Klahr, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child, Peggy Ahwesh, Luther Price, Joel Schlemowitz, Sarah Halpern, Richard Foreman, Squat Theater, The Wooster Group, John Zorn, Christian Marclay, Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy, DJ Shadow, David Shea, Danger Mouse, George Martin, James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, Breton, Rimbaud, Lautrèamont, Negativland, Plunderphonics, Hipgnosis…

To mystify, disorient, provoke, delight, surprise, confuse, puzzle, stimulate, enlighten, arouse, anger, entrance, inspire…