Among its members were Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi. They wanted to get away from prevalent artistic approaches, either modernistic or more traditional. In 1952, the Independent Group (IG) was formed in London. Quite often the magazine used photomontages to get their messages across, like on the cover where a collage by Seymour Chwast illustrates the generation gap by collaging photographs of contributors Richard Lorber and Ernest Fladell into Lorber’s sunglasses. My parents were not very interested in art, but Life provided me with ample “artistic” impressions. When the student revolt started in May 1968, I was not yet 14 years old, but I remember how Life magazine collaged Delacroix’s Marianne into a photo of a contemporary student barricade. I can’t remember that I ever read it, but the pictures piled up in my head, and, as a sort of self-defence, I cut them out and turned them into collages. It had become mainstream, turned into mannerism and effects.(2) For me, however, who was nurtured on British pop music, this time was an intense and decisive beginning. In the book Collage: The Making of Modern Art, author Brandon Taylor sees the early 1960s as a period of decline for the collage. In my head, they emerged at the very same time. For me, collage and pop music are intimately connected. In this drab, brown and coal-tarnished English vacuum, Pop art emerged out of sheer necessity, and a few years later British pop music started to conquer the world. In England after the Second World War, the craving for the American lifestyle, its shining and erotically charged consumer goods and its Afro-American music, was enormous. Therefore art must appear to be complex, pretentious, profound, serious, intellectual, theatrical…”(1)Īt the beginning of the 1950s, some artists allied with consumer society, or at least its visual expression.
#Age of rebellion art professional#
“To justify artist’s professional parasitic and elite status in society, he must demonstrate artist’s indispensability and exclusiveness, he must demonstrate the dependability of audience upon him, he must demonstrate that no one but the artist can do art. The same spirit can be found in George Maciunas’ second Fluxus manifesto from 1965. Public taste was defied both in the lyrics and the music, but also by the raw and dirty collage-inspired artwork on the album covers and in the fanzines: Collage as “up yours!” Punk rockers spat in the face of official mores and played their instruments badly. Punk was a reaction against the pretentious pop music of the day. In the 1970s, a cocky successor to Dada was found in the Punk movement. All that was needed was a stack of magazines, a pair of scissors, a knife, and a pot of glue. Just after the First World War, Dada revolted against the political and spiritual barbarity of Western civilization and its petrified bourgeois art. Everything is possible! These radical cuts appeal to the impatient: Everything at once. The cuts of collage turn downside up, high goes underground, beautiful turns ugly, and the common gets the crown. The second one is to wed oil with water: the aesthetics of opposites.Ĭollage willingly lends itself to rebellion and resistance. Destroy, isolate, and abduct is the first command of collage. With resolute cuts, inner organs, plumbing tubes, house facades, or smiling mouths are removed from their contexts. When the sharp knife pierces into the thin tissue of the paper, holes and gaps appear in its tracks, ideological and cultural cracks, dislocations and distortions.
Collage in the Service of Rebellion or We Are Only in It for the Money?Ĭollage is a fast, destructive and irreversible art form, as if it was made for blackmailers and iconoclasts who use a pair of scissors as their weapon.
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