About Making Collages
In some kinds of art, self-assertion, decision, control and manipulation—determining exactly what and how an object of art is produced—are paramount. In that kind of art, claims of originality and uniqueness are of great importance. In collage and the art of found objects, artists allow forces beyond their control to determine major aspects of the work. What they find (or what finds them receptive), and what condition it’s in, and its best use, are important elements.
The art of found objects often depends more on what happens to the artist—what he stumbles across that inspires him—than on plans, attaining a personal goal, or using technique to achieve an object. Art of the found depends on a happy accident, an unexpected discovery, a gift that falls in your lap, like a dream image, and improvising based on that. It’s an on-again off-again game of Catch-as-Catch-Can. Dadaism’s one-offs are famous for this—Marcel DuChamp and Max Ernst, for example, are remembered for pieces that are unique, not necessarily having one theme or hallmark unifying their artworks. Craft is also important—Kurt Schwitters, Romare Bearden, and Hannelore Baron composed precise compositions, even if elements are unexpected finds incorporated to give a surprise. Neat and clean is better than random, messy, and tacky.
Despite the truism that much depends on the fortuitous catch, the lucky strike, there is more to the process. Chance is important—yes—but people with a trained eye, with the interest and the impulse to find interesting things are probably the best collagists. Thoreau’s journals are great verbal compositions of findings because of his eager eyes and interests applied in his everyday life. The best collagists select according to their tastes, affinities, repulsions and loves. They find startling elements to incorporate—as a treasure hunter seeks precious unique items. And with practice they mature in their abilities to make compositions of debris which is carefully culled, not random. We collage-makers are finding objects by chance, yes, but also selecting bits that resonate somehow with deep themes and suggest far more than meets the eye.
Things found along the way are bound to be a mixed bag. Rough gems grabbed and stashed on the run, then rediscovered, are bound to bear a ragtag aspect. Quilts are like that too, patchwork inventions making the best of used scraps. There’s a special charm to that kind of vitality, as there is to what Ruskin called “grotesques”—sketchy bits with twists of fantastic verve in them, rough, gargoylish, vivid, weird. I tend in my arts and writings to prize these things I find—odd scraps and fragments spilled on the street, discards, windblown messages from the unknown and eloquent off-the-cuff blurts likely to be embarrassments to more formal thinkers. To me they’re “diamonds found in dunghills.” Wherever you find gems you pick up what you need for artwork.
My process makes for unruly works that develop naturally as time goes on, like kids needing haircuts, or trees needing trims. There are necessary prunings and selections of finds, picking out the culminations, transplanting branches to grow in fertile soil—quirky figures and strange memes that refused to stay lost, demanding their place in the sun.
Found objects involve selection processes. For each bit used, thousands are seen, mulled over, passed by. Some of the best found objects are never collected, but seen in passing and then swept away by wind and street cleaners. I once saw a large colorful oval label outside a small fabric merchant’s shop in Delhi. (The one that got away had sky and clouds and a figure, a woman or goddess leaning out a doorway in bright-colored apparel. It was in the gutter, seen from a taxi window, not enough time to get out and get it. Too much traffic. How frustrating!)
As a kid I liked finding things: an arrowhead down at the creek, and on streets things like a silver ring from Mexico, coins, useful gently-worn items put out on junk day curbs. I am attracted to blank books—some are given to me as gifts, or inherited, or found, some are not blank, but are bound reports or catalogues, discarded by individuals or libraries. I have a memory of the thrill excitement in childhood at finding a box of pens and pencils in the snow, in the days when ball point pens weren’t plentiful, a dreamlike moment of a strange and lucky find. I like to be a bricoleur making art of found odds and ends. (Now, after years of gathering and composing collages mostly with found bits pasted on paper, I a am finding that camera and computer can be powerful tools to transform artworks too.)
My approach—being a lucky finder piecing together neglected materials, like German collagist Kurt Schwitters in the heyday of Dadaism and others did—is not confined to arts. Science has its finders and collectors too. “I do not mind being a scavenger, and I seek original references for parts I had—quite literally—picked from shelves of remaindered books and from other trash bins of science.” (Benoit Mandelbrot, the maverick scientist who was discoverer of the fractal geometry of nature, said this in an interview.) A diamond in a dung-heap is all the more a gem.
I am not claiming that every page of my collage journals and notebooks is a finished artwork. Some pages are just jotted notes, a torn image, a found scrap quickly glued in place, a bit that caught my attention—but a clue, a hint, a beginning perhaps of an idea to be developed further elsewhere. Isn’t art a play of dynamic images, a flow of suggestive figures, vivid gestures. Records of in-progress musing, not completed, but begun. Rather than full-fledged works of art, some pages are signs of imagination, glimmers on a path to the storehouse of images shared with others, archetypal visuals, rediscoveries waiting to be explored. Reverie worlds invite us in. One of my favorite writers put it this way: “The way into these memorial halls is personal, we each have our own doorways which make us believe that memoria itself is personal, our very own. The psychoanalytical couch is one such door, the poet’s notebook, the writer’s table are others.” (James Hillman, Healing Fiction, p. 41.) Musing takes many forms. Our secret lives play out fantasies, in snatches of song, lyrical notes, daydream sketches, and mysterious visions, some of which are so vivid it seems they wish or demand to be remembered.
The collective unconscious is hard to profile— James Joyce’s great masterwork, Finnegan’s Wake, is a verbal river of puns and references to world literatures and history all bound in one volume, to represent the collective unconscious. Is it a success or a failure? A surface of confusion or an undercurrent of vitality using words, a flow of humanity in languageplay. It’s a doozie of a topic—a Medusa of dazzling snake-heads to make a portrait of, a glorious flood of story-moments, hard to pin down to just one simple pinpoint doodle. Maybe it’s more possible to express the unconscious in a lifetime of images, an ocean of faces. (I admire Joyce’s graceful progression of steps—Pomes Pennyeach; Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; Finnegan’s Wake. Wow, if only life were so simple. He was born to create bigger and more daring works, stage after stage.) I’m sure I seem nostalgic, but I love books. Why collage BOOKS? Why Book of Kells, why Jung’s Red Book? Why a lifetime obsession with books found, read, made? Why all the notebooks, steadily adding up, even when I didn’t know it.
Each image can hold a lot. I never stopped to consider the word “volume” until now. A long series of images bound together entails a great deal of “volume.” It is not easy to encompass mentally the extensive series of images at any given moment, in so many volumes full of so much imaginative volume. More exquisite details and variations are always hidden within the volumes, like the images in the collective unconscious, which is full of volumes without number.
Looking with a finder’s eyes, sharp as a jeweler’s loop, our vision begins to discover things others may miss, and weird perceptions begin to peek through the surface of conventional order, the tricky establishment world. The total output of years of collaging offers a kind of reflection on what the uncanny moonstone in my psyche is finding in life. You never know what surprises might turn up. We may also notice that activities such as editing film, writing poetry, collecting items of knowledge in our learning, etc. can be a kind of collaging. At least I do.
A found object plays by its own rules. It brings brings possibilities of play and discovery, chance and synchronicity. Salvador Dali arrives at a press conference to announce his design for a new perfume bottle. The flashbulbs are flashing. He is arriving with nothing, empty-handed. Then he reaches down and picks up a hot flashbulb that just popped off a camera. “This is my new perfume bottle design.” He depended on a moment of luck in the nick of time. The scientist, the pragmatist, may not get it. It’s a game where there are different rules. The found object seizes power and attention. It’s a one-off, fortuitous, with its own potential, its own unique calling. It can claim amazing successes when all the stars are aligned just so.
Then there’s the way collage-making with found objects is about salvage, a salvation of sorts. The saving part of the process—an object is lost, discarded, wasted, ruined, and along comes the finder, who saves that forlorn lost sheep—redeems it from a fate of abandonment and destruction. A scrap is found in the wilderness of the gutter, and it is held up, prominently placed in a special mandala. A story of grace and redemption, mercy and happy fate. "I once was lost but now I'm found, was blind but now I see." What seemed worthless is now better than ever. A lucky find can make a lucky save. Aesthetic recycling brings out inherent values, liberating potential for beauty and worth from obscurity, placing the saved fragment in its rightful or best kind of context, like a character in a Dickens novel who goes from a life of penury and drudgery to finding a home in a family estate he never knew he owned.
The saving has to do with the finding, discovering, recognizing, valuing, cherishing—spying the hidden usefulness amid flotsam. The worth of hidden treasure—nugget of gold, diamond in the rough, a part of a puzzle, the necessary piece—can be recognized. We see it’s not random trash, but something to be rescued from oblivion, salvaged from a fate of meaninglessness, waste, disgrace, ruin. The dignity of finding a place in wabi-sabi view. (Wabi sabi is a Japanese term for a view of accepting impermanence and imperfection in life.) Things not included in our preferences may be perfect in their own way. Perfection is like a satori fractal capable of further self-similar fractalizing and improvement.
But the process of finding, arranging and gluing often goes on without much ado. (I use Jade glue from Talas Art Supplies.) In a daily changing flow new images emerge in the ordinary work of the psyche. Just the making of something beautiful or weird or funny or truthful in human emotions, or something wise, or stunning, from whatever do-dad odds-and-ends come together just right, is enough to reveal a world’s psyche.
What gives an artist the freedom to bi-sociate two frames of reference ordinarily kept apart, to creatively bridge them, relating them together into a collage artwork? Where do artists get the bright ideas of hooking up two images in surrealist poetic justice? Our best cartoonists are geniuses of this.
What lucky break inspires the creative metaphor that really clicks? A creative mood of possibility and hopeful openness. A butterfly-in-the-breeze lightness, and a sprite of suggestion, a willingness to give it a go, see what happens even if only entertaining it for a second. A touch of grace. That’s the intuitive spark that kindles new beauties of creative collage to fly free. Next time you find amazing debris, try making a collage, and you'll see.