Over the course of the twentieth century, the twin developments of mass production and mass media in the capitalist economies of the Global North completed a total transformation of everyday life, reorienting almost every activity toward consumption. Things once locally produced and often handmade were now mass produced and commodified, turning local, artisanal producers into deskilled laborers serving the assembly line.
This world of mass production radically altered the meaning of objects in an unprecedented and profound reification that reached into every sphere of life. This was not just the fate of objects, but also of the practices with which they are always enmeshed. Mass production and commodification liquidated what remained of folkways tied to local production, demanding people construct the meaning of their lives through purchases rather than production.
This transition to a lifeworld of consumption affected not only concrete objects, but even more forcefully altered symbolic and aesthetic practices. Technologies of mechanical reproduction redefined story, image, and music, altering the traditions of both fine and folk art with mass produced and distributed forms in newspapers, advertising, radio, film, and television that shattered the aura of fine art and liquidated folk art almost completely.
Rather than making their stories, images, and music, ever more urbanized workers and managers consumed new massproduced art forms that, epitomized by the Hollywood studio system, developed into the walltowall mediascape of twentyfour hour broadband that now blankets the city, the suburb, and the country alike.
Given these developments, this article seeks to answer the following questions: How did art and literature respond to this age of consumption? What do the productions and practices of artists and writers reveal about the meaning of mass production, consumption, reification, mechanical reproduction, and meaning?
Artists and writers leave a unique record of struggle, argument, critique, tactics, and invention. They explicitly struggle with and reflect on the problems of meaning, and, moreover, these struggles are not categorically different from the problems everyone faces in a world of consumption.
By understanding the response of art and literature, we understand the problems, urgencies, and possibilities of a world unfolding through the commodity form. The thesis is that artists in every medium throughout the twentieth century turn to collage to respond to the possibilities and limits of an inescapable consumer culture.
By employing collage techniques, artists solve the problem of making meaning in a readymade world. Through collage, artists find ways to evade, negotiate, reflect, or sometimes undo the reification of commodity culture.
Connecting collage practices across mediums, genres, art movements, nations, and times, the prevalence of the technique cannot be understood simply as the unfolding necessity of a particular medium’s evolution or a localized response to specific problems, but rather reflects a truly dialectical response to the ubiquity of the commodity form as it developed though mass production, mass media, and consumer culture.
Artists and writers broadly adopted two tactics to cope with mass production. The first was to resist commodification and develop nonalienated relationships to their work. The abstract expressionist painters most vividly embody this tactic of direct resistance, an attempt to evade or escape the demands of consumer culture through the most revolutionary aspirations of romanticism.
Strikingly, however, the two greatest visual artists of the century, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, chose a second tactic. Instead of openly resisting or evading the commodity form they went into it, directly engaging it with what Jean Baudrillard calls the fatal strategy–becoming the very thing the system demands, but pushing this process to such an extreme that it is dialectically transformed.
Just as everyone had to cope with buying standardized, massproduced goods from store shelves and watching the latest Hollywood stars, Duchamp and Warhol turned directly to the commodities of mass production and mass media respectively, going beyond a revival of romanticism by developing new modes of critical, ironic, and sometimes celebratory practice. Duchamp took objects of mass production and named them readymades while Warhol appropriated the techniques of advertising and the very images of mass media.
Their reliance on materials they did not create themselves, but simply found readytohand, put them in the position of consumers expressing themselves through choice rather than technique. Duchamp and Warhol embody most clearly the importance of artists turning toward the materials of consumer culture and adopting the very practice of consumption as a way to make meanings in excess of the instrumental ends of commodity culture and in contradiction of the culture industry’s expectations or desires.
The meanings Duchamp and Warhol make possible in their practice and their body of work are sometimes critical, often deeply personal, and, arguably, offer models to understand how ordinary people negotiate the need for meaningful production and practice in the midst of standardization and its dialectical loss of tradition.
Though Duchamp and Warhol are not ordinarily thought of as collage artists, collage techniques provide the best way to understand their practices, as well as the practices of the most significant artists and writers wrestling with the realities of consumer culture.
Twentiethcentury collage techniques make use of consumer culture, cutting up massproduced objects and media to actively produce new works in almost every field, from the war protests of dada poets and the excesses of surrealism to postwar interventionist photomontage and musicians assembling new music out of readymade fragments.
The technique of collage is a negation of consumption that turns the process into a positive practice of production while remaining completely within and working through the commodity form in consumer culture. Simultaneously, collage techniques remain a mirror of the very consumerist culture they often seek to critique, relying on the very kinds of choices and labors that define the behaviors of consumers.
Furthermore, collage becomes one of the most widespread and perceptive metaphors for the phenomenal experience of everyday life in consumer culture characterized by overproduction and media, and as metaphor it is mobilized by popular writers and filmmakers to vividly evoke the experience of a radically fragmented world.
It is the very way that collage both contests and reproduces the alienation of a world mediated by the commodity form that makes this technique so apt and powerful and explains the predominance of Duchamp and Warhol. Collage techniques consist of two actions: selection and arrangement. These actions take many different forms, but they are always recognizable.
In papier collé and photomontage, the artist cuts apart readymade images or words and then pastes them together in a new work. In filmic montage, shots are cut apart and then spliced together to create a new whole. In assemblage, whole or fragmented objects are selected and then put together in a novel arrangement.
Even Duchamp’s readymades contain both moments, as the anonymous, serially produced commodity is first selected but must then be placed within the new institutional context that transforms it into a work of art. There is a narrative dimension to this process, as the selection must precede the arrangement, and thus collage can be thought of not only as two actions but as two moments in time, the whole telling a story of transformation.