"When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see. We are not given the world: we make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection."[1]
I have been interested lately in the work of a number of artists whose work, for me, shares certain qualities, despite being created in different media. This basic quality is that they recombine diverse materials in a personal way to create something new, or observe some single thing in a way that causes the viewer/listener to see it or hear it in a new way. Some, but not all, of them are explicitly collage oriented, but all of them create new meaning by placing familiar materials in new contexts, or look at things from an unexpected viewpoint. In future posts, I hope to examine some of these artists in detail. For starters, I would like to look at collage in general.
"The meaning of an image is changed according to what one sees immediately beside it or what comes immediately after it."[2]
Maybe by now collage is considered old news, as it has been a major, established art form for a century now (Donald Barthelme has gone so far as to assert that the principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century), but, as new media are introduced, new artists are always coming along and using the content of these new media as the source materials for collage-based work. Collage is always fresh and always necessary because, by recontextualizing materials, it has the power to shake things up in the eye/ear/mind of the beholder. This is because our everyday existence is predicated on things -- words, objects, sounds, artworks -- all having a culturally determined meaning, significance, or order. A piece of music is expected to progress in a certain fashion. There are unspoken, agreed upon relationships between words and the concepts they signify. These agreements are generally benign, and enable us to communicate, so that when I say "sky," you don't think that I mean "briefcase." Still, it is worth shaking up the complacency that comes with our unconscious reliance on these norms of communication.
