STUDIO PRIMER A: COLLAGE + BRICOLAGE

This first entry for studio precedents presents a genealogical primer on the core practices and aesthetics of collage and bricolage: assemblage, juxtaposition, and layering.

Overview

For our first studio module we will be exploring digital techniques for collage using Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop, notably, adapts a set of tools and processes drawn from photographic image making, from initial exposure of light-sensitive film to chemical development and manual post-processing. While the basic tenets of collage (mixing and assembling heterogenous media, cutting and pasting) predate photography, this primer will focus on the emergence of collage as a formal aesthetic technique through the collision (bricolage) of photographic images and other media of “mechanical realism” layered with the figurative and abstract realms of other visual arts (painting, drawing, etc).

In this sense, working with Photoshop intersects in a historically important way with the technical lineage of collage while incorporating new possibilities for engaging the transformation of “mechanical realism” into what we might call our contemporary “digital realism.” This transformation is not without friction; geospatial and other kinds of data complicate the mimetic (i.e., imitative or representational) function of photography in powerful ways. 

Thinking across mechanical and digital modes of collage opens up important compositional questions:

• How might collage open up aesthetic strategies for exploring contemporary spaces of the unmapped and unmappable through assembling and remixing representational (e.g., photographic) and non-representational (e.g., data) spatial media?
  
  
• Rather than a new form of mapping (or even “counter-mapping”), might we consider collage a kind of unmapping that affirms alternative, non-cartographic ways of knowing space, place, and the bodies and relations stitching them together?
  

Mechanical (sur)realism at war: Histories of post-war collage, part 1

Within the scope of modern art practice, collage appears on the artistic scene in Paris and Berlin around the end of the 19th century. Avant-garde artists like Max Ernst (Here Everything Is Still Floating (Hier ist noch alles in der Schwebe), 1920, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), below] take up collage as way to critically engage, work out, and experiment with the increasing mechanization of social life, from the factory floor to mass-produced experience like film. 

This is particularly important with respect to World War I, the first fully “industrialized” war in which bodies of soldiers, machines, and the earth were increasingly enmeshed in and mangled by the mechanical operations and machinic model of warfare — a thematic motif that recurs throughout the (overwhelmingly male) practitioners of early post-war collage work. The resultant collaged assemblages bring into relief the unfamiliar and uncanny relations between bodies, materials, landscapes, and an ever-expanding range of temporal and spatial scales.

Different visual elements drawn from disparate source materials could be remade into an apparently seamless but troubling whole (see Ernst, Water below); or those elements could be more obviously juxtaposed and layered to emphasize explicit discontinuity and dissimilitude.


In both cases, the radical (and often forced) recontextualization of images through reference to each other generated spaces of tension and difference, fraught with non-linear scalar and historical relations.

For many of these artists, collage offered a way to turn the tools of mechanical realism against itself, revealing the deep contradictions and violent histories through which European rationalism so quickly transformed its “civilized” world into the crucible of unprecedented and unrivaled barbarism. For artists like Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, and others in Dadaist/Surrealist circles, the jarring, often grotesque juxtapositions of imagery drawn from apparent avatars of “civilization” and “barbarism” — the very threshold of difference justifying white supremacist cultures of racial colonialism emanating out from Europe, England, and the United States and Canada — showed a more complicated entanglement of socio-psychic relations transgressing those oversimplified boundaries. Höch, working athwart the masculinist focii of her peers, marshalled transcultural imagery of women (an early Italian film star, a Cameroonian dance mask) to trace a generalized subaltern status across different geographic and historical contexts, finding another domain of internal contradiction and “boundary struggle” (Fraser 2014). We should note here that these critiques were still made at the expense of a racialized and gendered Other — here, black women, outside the frame, rendered only partially as a function of another subject.


On the one hand, then, collage operated as a mode of critique opening up onto an unplumbed collective unconscious unbound by rational modes of thought; on the other hand, it offered a way to explore the speculative possibilities of those new, surreal spaces of imagination, moving beyond the catastrophic failures of the capitalist-colonial “web of life.” Collage soon became a more formal exercise codified in the sort of holistic art education typified by the Bauhaus; collage began to represent not only a novel way to create relationally-rich images, but to liberate thought and experience from the rigid matrix of rationalism.


The limitations of that liberation were made plain by artists like Höch and, later, Romare Bearden. Insofar as collage approaches the body as a key site of boundary struggle, incessantly reconfigured by contradictory and overlapping historical contexts and material conditions, the particularity of those bodies and embodied experience matters. Bearden, working in the context of the Great Migration (1916–1970s) of Black flight from the Jim Crow South to northern cities, evinces a quasi-mystical figure of a “conjur woman” from torn and cut found imagery that mediates supernatural and natural spheres, an axis of deep power and, as Silvia Federici and others argue, perennial threat to a white, patriarchal order. That the racialized and gendered figure of the witch persists through collage across post-traumatic periods following the world wars suggests a importance in rendering a hidden historical continuity through aesthetic discontinuity. As guides for a heterodox historiography of the “hidden abode,” these collages do work that a conventional map cannot — and perhaps should not — do.




The Geo-politics of Collision: Histories of post-war collage, part 2

The radical and rapid transformations to the built environment following World War II — as a result of destruction of cities and landscapes during the war, rebuilding, and new development across the world — fomented a spatial imagination echoing with Dadaist and Surrealist tendencies from the first “post-war” period. The blasted social and physical landscape not only revealed forgotten historical geologic and urban strata but jumbled them together as so much bombed-out rubble. The confrontation between different spatial imaginations and their artifactual remains — namely the vernacular traditions of local and regional styles against the scientific universalism of modern architecture and urbanism — set the stage for what architectural theorist and historian Colin Rowe and his collaborator Fred Koetter called the “politics of ‘bricolage’.” Bricolage, borrowed from French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, referred to the verb bricoler, associated with a playful domain of activity: “ball games and billiards, hunting, shooting, and riding” (Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Rowe and Koetter 102). More specifically, it referred to a creative potential in the moment of “extraneous movement” resulting from a collision, rebound, or reaction. The bricoleur — one who practices bricolage as a deliberate but aleatory (full of chance) activity —

is still someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of the craftsman… is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer…does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.

(Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Rowe and Koetter, 102–103)

Rowe and Koetter extrapolate this figure to describe the post-war urban condition as that of the accidental “collage city,” where the very production of space is a dialectical process moving back and forth between scientific, rationalist planning and creative bricolage. For them, to take up bricolage against the hegemony of rationalist planning constituted a political maneuver, developing a political aesthetics of spatial production to grapple with the non-linearity of time as a construct equally applicable to psychic experience, architecture, and urban geography.



Collage had, however, long been an architectural tool for rendering imaginary spaces. One of the major exponents of modern architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, used collage throughout his career. His collages did not necessarily share Rowe’s post-modern ambitions, but began to move from a photorealistic style (below top left) to bolder, more abstract, textural, and symbolically-complicated compositions (below top right and bottom row). Like Dadaist and Surrealist collages, the overlaying of disparate spatial and temporal scales alongside culturally heterogenous elements demanded an act of imagination from an undefined (though, in the case of art and architecture, predictable with respect to class, race, and gender) viewer. Collage does not simply represent imagined spaces to the viewer, but implicates the viewer in the production of space through an imagination variably activating both lived experience and cultural context.







The production of imaginary spaces through collage could also be put to work to reveal invisible histories and forces at work in and on the landscape. Hans Hollein, for example, began to compose stark, photorealistic collages for which landscape as such became the subject of transformation. His Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape (1964) at once critically comments on the ubiquitous yet occluded militarism of the Cold War period, the comparable scales of post-war artifacts of militarism and urbanism, and the lie of pastoral peace in a world where even agricultural production became entrained in global geopolitics.


Other architects developed more speculative, future-oriented visions: Ron Herron, a member of the London-based experimental architecture collective Archigram (1961–1974), generated a series of collages for a “Walking City” roaming across non-urban spaces, from forested mountains to the ocean. The Walking City proposal, fantastical as it is, must be read not only through Herron’s collages but in relation to more critical work by Hollein; its radical urban autonomy is in direct contrast to the inescapable overdetermination of landscapes by Cold War geopolitics. In a very different context, the libertarian Seasteading Institute has adopted Herron’s vision as an icon of a narrowly-defined economic freedom, becoming a model for the mobile tax haven increasingly capturing the imagination of tech billionaires new and old. Collages, by nature of bricolage, converse with each other across time, appropriating one collage as “raw material” for another, transforming contextual relations yet again.


A similar pattern of bricolage is found in the work of Superstudio (Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Alessandro Poli, 1966–1978; Florence, Italy) and Rem Koolhaas, founder of OMA. Superstudio’s Continuous Monument project imagined a superstructural grid girdling the globe, with only slight variations to accommodate existing conditions. The monument inverted the typical relation between collaged objects and landscapes: rather than inserting a new object into a landscape, the “object” here became the frame for the landscape, performing a radical and simultaneous de- and recontextualization of everyday spaces and life. Following the traditions of collage, these were not only spatial transformations, but psychic ones as well, delving into the hidden abodes of the unconscious, then surfacing and recontextualizing what was found there (see bottom row, right).





Around the same time, Koolhaas appropriated the Superstudio grid (center image) to suggest that the superstructure was already in place: the mass sprawl of post-war suburbia. Superstudio’s emancipatory (if ironic) tone became a more cynical spatial gesture: denizens of the developed urban world were, to Koolhaas, “voluntary prisoners of architecture.”




Yet again, the question of the viewer returns through the collage: who exactly are the “voluntary prisoners” of architecture as envisioned by modern and post-modern architects? Reflecting on the post-slavery legacies of Jim Crow, redlining, and mass incarceration, Amanda Williams, Olalekan Jeyifous, V. Mitch McEwen, and other architects and artists affiliated with the Black Reconstruction Collective use collage as a vector of emancipatory expropriation to imagine spaces for Black futures too often excluded from the various visions of the “Collage City.” Collage becomes a medium for asking a question that runs through each of these legacies, but is transformed and radicalized by the position from which the question is posed: “How do we design free spaces?” Here is yet another power of the collage: to re-ask a question that has not been answered, or is unanswerable, without having first stepped into the hidden abode.




The last set of examples of contemporary collage involve a more direct confrontation with geography as a form of knowledge, representation, and power. Nowhere is this more apparent than the emergence and recurring collapse of the well-bounded, well-defined Westphalian nation-state. Building on critiques by radical spatial thinkers, particularly those drawing on anarchist traditions in geography, the nation-state is itself a violent form of geographic collage: the tearing of a figure from its background that recontextualizes the territory around it, often without reference to complex histories of kinship, migration, subsistence relations to land, or ecology. In this vein, collage became a key technique for Situationist artists and activists during the radical, student-led political movements leading up to and after 1968, challenging the hegemony of the state to define, organize, and administer space.

The border — whether between neighborhood, city/non-city, or nations — became an especially fraught figuration of state power and site of struggle to subvert it. Guy Debord and other situationists proposed the dérive — an experimental, undirected way of moving through the city— as a mode of unmapping state space while producing new “psychogeographies” of the city that could not be rendered by conventional cartographic means. Teddy Cruz, a Guatemalan architect and activist working in the San Diego/Tijuana region, remixes Debord’s diagram in his own research on the border. Cruz’s “conflict map” suggests that even as we recognize the border as a thickened space full of human and non-human forces and flows (see top row, right; bottom row), no single method of representation conveys the complex layerings of life through which the border itself becomes a living geographic protagonist, and a rich space for a reimagined “politics of bricolage.”




The border, finally, is a paradigmatic space of surveillance, a geography for which image-making is automated by drones, satellites, and cameras keeping watch for bodies out-of-place. Surveillance becomes a kind of anti-collage, putting everything in its place, and refusing any question that would require a recontextualization of the border. This suggests another iteration of the collage: using the surveillance apparatus itself as a medium, as in JR’s Gigantic Picnic project. The artist and collaborators staged a cross-border picnic, using a table set with a textile printed with the eyes of a “dreamer” (DACA recipient) looking back at the surveilling state. Here, collage becomes a medium of presentation, rather than representation — a showing up, surfacing, or presencing of a “hidden abode” of power rather than its mere depiction. The collage can become a physical technique of tactical geographic intervention, scaling itself to the landscape rather than to the image of the landscape, producing real and imaginary spaces in one and the same movement.

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