All Cut Up

To go with a fairly fractured state of mind and a personal history of hours spent creating moodboards (that’s textiles for you), more and more often I’m drawn to collage as a form of art.

I’ve always been fascinated by colour and texture. I was that child who couldn’t stop feeling/breaking things, so much so my parents implemented strict no touch policy in shops, which if anything acted as encouragement. Yeah, yeah I was subversive from an early age, I know. This preoccupation is far from dormant.

So maybe this is why I enjoy the juxtaposition of media fundamental to collage. Not only does it usually offer a veritable explosion of hues but also an opportunity to contrast material.

Ben Giles

Bryan Olsen - Slice of Life

Bryan Olsen - Land of Degaussed Souls

That isn’t to say collage intrinsically lacks subtlety. The works of Peter Yumi provide a master class in sensitivity, his black and white pieces stand out for me as a result of their understatement.

Peter Yumi - James Dean

It seems that, although collage is transforming from peripheral to focal for me, in their own way great, established artists like Picasso and the cubists in general create effects similar to collage, with their broken and reassembled objects.  Thinking about it Surrealism and Dadaism also capture this smashed up quality providing a precursor to modern collage.

With all movements beginning in the early 20^th century, Surrealism emerging from Dadaism, which coexisted with cubism, it’s possible to see their fractured works as a strong reaction contrary to the war emerging from a capitalist, colonial and ordered society.  Tristan Tzara, leader of the Dada movement emphasized collage was anti-art, appropriate for a society which was undeserving of art’s beauty.  For him the college was the destruction not the creation of works.

Or maybe collage can be seen as a developing innovation that reflected a need to match the technological advancements of the era. With photography growing in popularity and technicality other artistic forms were encouraged to flourish too.

Picasso - Guernica

Picasso - Weeping Lady

Jacques Prévert
(For me, Jacques' Collages are far better than his fundamentally hypocritical poetry)

Raoul Hausmann

Antithesis of artistic substance or not, Collage is enduring in its appeal and attraction.

Linden

Background

I took the photograph used as background a couple of years ago in Paris. It was a icy day with a beautiful sky shot through with icy looking vapour trails. You can't see very clearly here but the dark object at the bottom is a cenotaph. The bowed figure was sombre, commanding and also menacing, sort of as if it was aware of more violence to come.

I'm not sure about this pastel backdrop, but I'm too scared of infringing copyright and have too little of my own photography to provide anything else for the moment. Bear with me.

On a side note, this blogging thing is bizarre. like shouting into a hole or a vacuum or something.

début

Having had a quadruple espresso and failed to fully preempt the caffeine induced effects, it seems only logical to start a blog. So I have. And although I doubt anyone will see it, there’s something tantalizing about the prospect of filling a space with my thoughts. 

However, this won’t be a random stream of consciousness. With the desire to become an art dealer, and interests which predominantly lie in humanities the focus will be cultural.

Linden

Warning: Sentence structure is a personal weakness.

P.S. After proof reading this I realized I’d repeatedly used (and have now changed) the word ‘fail’. An exam time Freudian slip if ever I saw one.