For some time now, I have been monitoring the condition of contemporary collage and its value within the field of fine art, with developing bemusement. Immersed as we are in an urbanised, multi-media world where all visual experience is cross-fertilised and montage is layered upon assemblage, the surprise is that in the fine arts, these techniques are seriously under-utilised.
Apart from photography [and its progeny cinematography], collage is the only original visual medium sired by the industrial revolution. a by product of cheap, mass-produced printing, it was absorbed into folk art by Victorians, whose thematic, often sentimental designs were used to adorn firescreens, framed panels and book covers.
It took Picasso to elevate the method to a fine art medium; a piece of oilcloth printed with a chair cane design provided immediacy of means ideally suited to further explore the terrain we now know as Cubism. Yet while Cubism as a visual philosophy thrived, collage, central to its development, largely withered. It can be regarded quite justifyably as the great non-event of Modernism. Notable exceptions of course can be found in the work of Heartfield, Schwitters and Cornell. Collage lent itself to the ethos of Pop Art and its cool [not to say cold], ironic use of industrial, commercially rendered imagery.
But contemporary collage? Look on the internet. Collage is mired in an easily wrought international style of surreal juxtapositions with little modulation and less thought. The medium's most apparent feature is also its greatest weakness. There is little or no integration of its individual elements. Composition and theme are dictated by the component fragments -not by the artist. The medium seems to have barely graduated beyond the level of a mid-teens level art class execise. The results suggest piles of magazines, apair of scissors and a pot of paste on a classroom deskby a window looking onto a bedrizzled Friday afternoon playground. Roll on the weekend...
Collage could be so much more than this Just because the materials are ready to hand, the artwork need not be so crass. Lets face it, the medium of oil painting is simply coloured mud and basic chemistry. Yet in the hands of gifted painters, it has been utilised to to map and navigate the vastness of human experience.
Is paper so resistant a material that only the very few can master the obvious discrepancies of scale and colour printing discordance between fragments?
Is collage regarded as a secondary discipline because of a perception that it is not a colourfast material? If cared for and protected in the same way as watercolour, a collage should have a comparable life-span.
I came across these collages by Glenn Ibbitson recently. At first, I wasn't sure what I was looking at; mixed-media paintings or digitally manipulated photographs? they imparted that slightly unnerving feeling one experiences upon entering a populated space, where the first few seconds are spent rather anxiously scanning the room for a familiar face. In those few moments, surveying a wide field of variable focus, certain textures and shapes assume an unwarranted significance because they may offer familiarity. Gradually, elements ease into focus and begin to make sense in their allocated space. Precisely how these images worked on me.
On his technique, the artist writes:
"Surfaces are constantly adjusted through a series of overlayerings, and areas of detail are more painstakingly constructed with smaller paper fragments. A unique characteristic of this form of collage is the variation in focus which one is able to achieve by combining the printed image edges with the physical tears of the paper fragment itself, producing ambiguities of form and space. Increasingly, the success of a work hinges on one fragment of torn paper which provides that special intersection of textural or colour juxtaposition, not evident when originally embedded in the printed page. This elusive fragment cannot be manufactured: it is discovered and usually only by accident. Its incorporation represents the point at which the composition assumes a life of its own and deviates positively from the original plan."
This suggests a reliance on chance; but here, chance is subject to decision and re-organsation. If the fortuitous combination does not work in the context of the composition as a whole, it will not survive. Note that this artist starts work according to a plan..
These works utilise the printed matter sometimes as image, as in a montage, and sometimes purely for their tone and hue as in a mozaic. Often they perform both functions simultaneously. Unusually for paper collages, there is an overall coherance across the picture surface which one finds more usually in a painting. This is achieved through a fairly standardised size of paper unit. The artist's attention to surface cohesion seems to be a preoccupation across his ouvre and can be seen in his paintings and prints on other pages within his website. He uses collage as a solution to "artist's block", providing source material for other paintings and drawings. Even here, where the results are so evocative and lyrical, the medium is a secondary function of his primary creative thrust. I would suggest a more central role for collage in his work, and in that of fine art in general, nearly one hundred years after a piece of printed wicker design should have changed the face of Modern Art...
September 2008
