THE HISTORY OF COLLAGE
It wasn’t until the 20th century that the term collage was coined (more on that shortly). However, Japanese calligraphers in the 12th century glued paper and cloth over their written poetry as a background. This technique could be defined as collage. Craftsmen of the 15th and 16th centuries in the Near East applied intricate designs to paper for their handmade books. In medieval times, around the 13th and 14th centuries, artists enhanced their painted spiritual images and icons on panels with a variety of materials including gold leaf (paper-thin sheets of gold held together with glue), cloth, jewelry, relics and hand colored papers. . The nuns were creating beautiful intricately designed bookmarks for their prayer books. All these ingenious applications are aligned with the collage technique.
In the early 19th century, with the advent of the camera and photography, families pasted photos into scrapbooks. Commercial displays and displays featuring photographic images of popular tourist attractions and European landmarks were mass-produced and became highly popular decorative items for the home.
CONTEMPORARY COLLAGE
It wasn’t until the 20th century that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque first glued material into their paintings. That’s when “collage” became a word that refers to a specific type of art form. The term collage is derived from the French “coller” which means “to paste or paste”. Soon collage became the word to describe a new and exciting artistic process.
The stage was set and Picasso and Braque were the protagonists. The traditional, idealistic, classical theme of the Renaissance and Romantic eras was on the wane. The Impressionists helped pave the way for this movement by choosing to paint local subjects: public gardens, cathedrals, and country lanes. Claude Monet, a famous impressionist, painted many studies of haystacks under continually changing daylight. It was therefore not surprising that artistic forerunners such as Picasso and Braque were using theater tickets and fragments of posters and newspapers in their paintings. Ultimately, his use of mass media materials set contemporary open standards for modern art:
(1) Any material can be used to make a work of art.
2) Any idea can be used for a work of art.
(3) Any technique can be used to make works of art.
Today, collage is an established art form that presents an imaginative, provocative, and often humorous perspective by using common, everyday objects as subject matter. Collage transforms the usual into the unusual. The skills required to make a collage are both visual and physical. The physical skill consists of combining objects to create a composition. Visual ability requires an eye and a mind sensitive to the meaning and context of objects.
HOW TO MAKE A COLLAGE?
Collage begins with the collection of a variety of materials to produce a “visual vocabulary.” This should be anything that appeals to you. Ransack your dresser drawers, go to garage sales, flip through your old photos, or do some trash diving. Believe in your attraction to the objects you have found. Keep in mind that the materials used in the collage can be anything: papers of any kind, fabric scraps, leaves, driftwood, plastic containers, herbs and seeds, old appliances, driftwood, leaves, etc. The possibilities are limitless! So start collecting! Next, start exploring and experimenting with how found objects can be combined in the composition to create a collage. Remember that the ultimate goal of collage is to bring together a collection of materials to create a new visual form. What could your collage represent? You could talk about your life using photos and other materials that reflect your personal history. You could make a statement, for example you could show how you feel about global warming and the environment. Or your collage could take you to a place you always wanted to go: a paradise of tropical beauty or a utopian city. Their imagination will be activated by collecting the materials and assembling them. And then your thoughts and feelings will be revealed.
JOINING METHODOLOGY
Collage is much more than just cutting and pasting things on a board. It takes skill to see beyond the obvious image. For example, if you were to go through the pages of a magazine and cut out all the images of eyes, then arrange them in a pattern, this would be a new way of looking at a familiar image in a different way. The image, repeated many times, is given over to the composition of the collage. Why? So you can see something else! When you look at the composition, the pattern will be apparent first, then you will identify the images of the eyes. The images of the eyes have become modules or units of design in a collage composition.
Here is another example. How could a group of photos and other materials that you collected from, say, your trip to Las Vegas be put together into a collage to represent a desert sunset? It would be necessary to go beyond the virtual material of photos and memories and translate it into the idea of sunset in the desert. You would have to adjust your eye to perceive photos of other materials as just colors and shapes. Once you can do this, you can jump the reality of your collected materials into another reality and create the sunset!
What if you want to make a collage that evokes the feel of, say, the 1950s? Using photos and images from that time would be an effective journalistic way of defining that period. However, it might be even more effective to choose a 1950s-esque color scheme by collecting lots of pink and black paper and then constructing an image of a car with big wings or a poodle skirt from those found papers. Why? Because it’s common to use imagery related to the 1950s. Choosing a 1950s color scheme and creating a symbol or icon from that period is more creative, more demanding, and more visually exciting.
Here is another example. You want to make a cityscape collage complete with letters and logos of well-known products: Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, Palmolive and John Deere, etc. that you have cut out of magazines. This project would be interesting and effective. However, it would be more of a challenge and a more provocative commentary to depict a forest scene using those commercial images. The combination of highly identifiable commercial themes in a pastoral image is much more provocative and attractive to the viewer. Imagine the effect if one sees a beautiful landscape, only to discover, on closer look, that the entire landscape is made up of logos of large corporations!
THE MAGIC AND POWER OF COLLAGE
Taking collage skills one step further takes the magic of collage to another level: the mysterious interaction between objects to form a new concept of collage. For example, famed artist Joseph Cornell created small boxes that housed compositions of curiosities that included antique toys and toy parts, mirrors, seashells, trinkets, fragments, posters, theater tickets, and postcards. Now found in many museum collections around the world, these boxes are tiny worlds, magical environments that often evoke a mysterious and sometimes terrifying feeling in the viewer. This reaction is caused by the combination of the objects in the box. For example, a 19th century playing card is interesting as a subject, but combined with a stuffed crow and an old wristwatch, the meaning of the composite objects changes. What does this combination of elements evoke? The raven, by itself, is simply a stuffed raven. But in combination with the other objects, it could look like a vulture. The wristwatch, just an old, discarded wristwatch, could be seen as a symbol of stopped time in the context of the other objects. And, playing cards, just old playing cards by themselves, in the context of combined objects, can symbolize fate.
The artist Robert Rauschenberg placed a stuffed goat with a tire in the center of one of his paintings. The combination was surprising, not only because of the rarity of the goat with the tire, but because the painting became a platform or pedestal for these curious objects. In collage, the combination of two or more objects or images can produce a subconscious reaction. The viewer cannot understand why the collage is captivating, but reacts strongly nonetheless: confused, fascinated, repelled, frightened or amazed.
Here is an example: In the artwork of the famous artist Lucas Samaras, the artist uses a simple chair as his subject. But, he has stuck pins in it and completely covered it. A chair, by itself, basically means comfort and rest. However, pinned, the chair becomes an anti-chair, an object that has become ugly and evokes a negative connotation. This, the viewer may think, is not a chair I would like to sit in, thank you.
THE USUAL TO THE UNUSUAL
Ultimately, the power and magic of collage is most effective when there is a tension of meaning between the objects or images that make up the collage. Honing collage skills, one travels from the usual to the unusual. A beginner might paste pictures of cars in a certain way on a board. The collage won’t be much more than ad copy. However, developing skills in the use of collage can bring new insights. For example, images of cars arranged one on top of the other and in many rows translate the image to another connotation: that perhaps all these beautiful new vehicles will end up on the junk lot. This makes the image much more provocative to the viewer and conveys a broader and more interesting statement.
The true power and magic of collage is in learning collage skills, so whatever the job, translating the images creates a strong and provocative composition.