Cut and Paste An Exhibition of Contemporary Collage
Garfield Park Arts Center, Indianapolis, IN
May 2 - 30, 2015
Featuring works by Indianapolis based artists working in this boundless medium. The origins of collage techniques go back hundreds of years but made a revitalized reappearance in the early 20th century when Cubist, Surrealist, Futurists, Dadaists and Pop artists took up the concept of collage in their works. Since then the medium has continued to expand with the use of sampling and copying made even more accessible by our digital age.
Brief History of Collage
“Anyone who has ever put a stamp on an envelope or a note on their refrigerator knows what it’s like to make a collage.” - Elliott Hundley
While the process of cutting and pasting of materials has been around since the advent of paper, the use of modern collage is often credited to the Cubist experiments of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso starting about 1906 or 1907. Various elements such as colored paper, wallpaper scraps, and musical sheets were incorporated into many of their works. At the time, the intermingling of high and low cultures was an audacious and revolutionary act and it was equally political as it was tongue in cheek. Since then, collage has proven to be an easily adaptable form of art making and has been reworked and repurposed nearly every decade since.
Many artists from the Dadaists to the Surrealists, to Pop artists utilized collage as a means to interact with existing materials - from newsprint to propaganda - destroying and deconstructing content as a means of creating visually dynamic reconstructions. One famous piece, “Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany” (1919), highlights Hannah Höch’s critique of racist and sexist ideals that existed in Weimar Germany by using fashion magazines, illustrated journals, photographs, and other materials that are found in the clutter of everyday life. Throughout her career, Höch challenged the marginalized place of women in Germany. Similarly, in the 1960s, artist Romare Bearden began clipping glossy magazines (which itself was a new media at the time) to create overtly socially conscious works that demonstrate how African-Americans rights were moving forward. His Prevalence of Ritual series rejected the notion that African Americans must reproduce culture in their art and spoke out about this limitation on Black artists.
The use of miscellaneous images invades and re-figures a pictures surface and dramatically alters the viewer's reading. The endless possibilities of placing several images together of seemingly little connection and creating contrasting effects, perfectly reflects the rise of mass culture and the relentless bombardment of images that vie for our attention. The act of cutting and ripping of content out of its intended context speaks to the artist as a scavenger and recycler of culture. Fundamentally, collage questions the concept of what it means to create art and offers a reflection into contemporary culture.
