Perspective
and color… are shareholders in the cowardly and smug philosophy that belongs to
the bourgeoisie. [Collage], on the other hand, points to the absolutely
self-evident that is within reach of our hands.
— Richard
Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada
[C]ollage,
often a method of paying attention to the left-overs of the world, of
preserving their integrity and equipping them with dignity, of compounding
matter of factness and cerebrality, as a convention and a breach of convention,
necessarily operates unexpectedly. … It is suggested that a collage approach,
an approach in which objects are conscripted or seduced from out of their
context, is –at present day– the only way of dealing with the ultimate problems
of, either or both, utopia and tradition…
— Colin Rowe
and Fred Koetter, Collage City [142-44]
For the contemporary artist Cyprien
Gaillard, collage has the ability to denaturalize conventions and meanings
inherent both in architecture and painting. His series “Belief in the Age of
Disbelief” directly places modern housing structures within 17th century Dutch
landscape etchings. Through these insertions, according to Monica
RamÃrez-Montagut, he simultaneously presents “the beauty and horrors of these
megastructures … [while] maintaining the evident dichotomy and an essential
separation between architecture and nature.”
The issues inherent within collage are
centered on the relationship and mutual dependence that the images –disparate
and foreign to each other– generate as a result of their newly constructed
association while, of course, maintaining some character of their own original
meaning. Synthetic cubism relied on these as well as on the re-semanticized
nature of the elements to give meaning to their compositions.
