Throughout, collage is central to understanding the development of the twentieth century because it is an uncanny mirror of both the Fordist production that characterized the first half of the century and the consumerist ethos that defined the postwar years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fordism was premised on a vast fragmentation of holistically integrated methods of production. Every aspect of the process was analyzed and standardized. What was once grasped as a totality was now seen as an assemblage of manipulable parts. This was not only applied to the parts and products fabricated on the assembly line, but through time\u00adstudies, the workers themselves were shattered, their own movements broken into the smallest possible parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cutting manufacturing processes into a series of irreducible operations, Fordism separated workers from any concrete grasp of a total process. This affected even perceptions of workers themselves, who Ford himself fantasized about as shattered wholes, noting that \u201cof the 7,882 distinct operations\u201d necessary to assemble a car, \u201cwe found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one\u00adlegged men, two by armless men, 715 by one\u00adarmed men, and ten by blind men.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fragmentation of mass production yielded an unprecedented profusion of things, filling store shelves with a vast array of different goods, all of them blank slates of reification, and by the 1950s, the number of goods and brands available presented consumers with the illusion of infinite choice, deadening sameness, and a new kind of labor\u2013consumption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Consumption comes to define not only a class position, but an endless bifurcation of identities\u2013drawing the finest distinctions in values and political commitments between a dizzying array of emerging subcultural possibilities. These difficult choices become a constant demand throughout the social as a consequence of the fragmentation of the world into an infinite series of objects to be assembled into a lifestyle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thus, fragmentation must not only be thought of in terms of production because it is equally the experience of the consumer. Lautr\u00e9amont\u2019s observation that the most beautiful work of art in the world is \u201cthe meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on the dissecting table\u201d became one of the slogans of surrealism, and even today, Lautr\u00e9amont\u2019s theory of beauty is recreated anew each moment as people fill shopping cart after shopping cart or surf through the channels of digital cable, or simply absorb the disparate advertising of a city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
William S. Burroughs goes so far as to suggest all of our perception must now be understood as the consumption of cut\u00adups, the constant confusion of categories and chance juxtapositions of elements: \u201cOf course, because cut\u00adups make explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unlike the assembly line worker, however, the moment of assemblage is more often not a reflection of production, but of the labor of consumption. Unlike traditional artists who grasped their art holistically\u2013old masters often mixed their own pigments, for instance\u2013the collage artist arranges fragments to which they have no holistic relationship through the labor of consumption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The process of assembling a collage more precisely mirrors the consumer wandering through a vast mall, selecting this and then that, bringing it all together in a new arrangement. Jean Baudrillard describes the codes of consumption in terms perfectly apt to the moment of collage assembly: \u201cthrough objects, each individual and each group searches out his or her place in an order, all the while trying to jostle this order according to a personal trajectory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Through the object, a stratified society speaks.\u201d Baudrillard here emphasizes how consumers try to both conform to and manufacture a narcissism of small differences at the same time. He captures the ways in which the ready\u00admade objects of capitalist production become a code with which to write our names in a seemingly privatized script.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like the consumer speaking a code of identity by assembling particular elements, the collage artist assembles a work from ready\u00admade materials to make an individual statement that nonetheless speaks the universal code of capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Though the final collage could well be shocking, critical, or irrational, it is assembled from the consistency of the commodity and mirrors and reproduces the operations of the consumerist lifeworld. As much as collage is a mirror of production and consumption, it can also operate as a deeply critical form, cutting against the typical practices and ideologies of both these moments of capitalism. For instance, just as holistic labors and even workers themselves are cut to fragments by the process of mass production, so collage artists no longer have to respect any work\u2013a book, an image, a passage of music\u2013as a totality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Collage artists cut into images, syntax, and contexts, breaking things apart with the same radical zeal of Fordism. In this, they can alter, expose, ridicule, or transform the coherence of ideologies. This is extraordinarily powerful, because the very forces of critique or transformation unleashed by capital are recontained in totalizing, coherent ideologies. Collage cuts into these, exposing and transforming the materials of ideological discourse. In less obviously resistant modes, collage also cuts against many imperatives of capitalist practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For instance, the imperative to dispose of goods, planned obsolescence, and sheer waste is recuperated and overturned in the nostalgic modes of collage practice that reuse what would be wasted, giving it new life in new contexts. By reusing objects, fragments, and waste, the collage artist offers a form of making meaning that suggests the imperative to the new, as the only possible way to make meaning, is a fraud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed,It will be argued at length that critique and nostalgia are the primary modes of collage, often coextensive in every work. Further, the radical juxtaposition of collage contests the coherent styles of the culture industry, and though new collage styles will be recuperated (as early MTV recuperated the radical styles of avant\u00adgarde film), the endless potential for recombination allows some on the terrain of everyday life to establish styles and produce meanings that are not completely overwritten by the point\u00adof\u00adpurchase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other examples of gleaning, thrifting, reuse, do\u00adit\u00adyourself, sampling, and copying offer concrete practices to rework some of the most pernicious aspects of the culture industry. The importance of collage techniques in every artistic medium in the twentieth century is often remarked upon, but rarely considered comprehensively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Collage depends not only on cutting and pasting, but on the ready\u00admade status of the fragments the artist brings together. Techniques like mosaic or decorative pasted papers have been assembled with cut and pasted fragments for thousands of years, but these practices are significantly different than collage as it is practiced throughout the twentieth century, and the brutal difference is that twentieth\u00adcentury fragments come ready\u00admade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A readymade is simply what we pluck off the shelves of a store or find cast off in a street or a dumpster. It is what other human hands have worked over, shaped, formed, completed, and almost always at some point sold as a commodity: it is \u201cready\u00admade\u201d for our use, and it is not nature. Historically, almost every human being has had to take the raw materials of the world\u2013be they the fibers of plants or the stones of the earth\u2013and labor to make them useful, beautiful, or deadly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is possible to fish in the most remote parts of the sea and net complete plastic objects from every part of the world. Discarded plastic dolls, toothbrushes, syringes, and Styrofoam cups wash up on the beaches of the world, just as they crash in waves onto the shelves of category\u00adkilling stores. Not only are the United States and Europe awash in cheap, expendable, disposable goods, but so is every corner of the earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The poorest villages in Africa, China, or South America have brightly colored plastic toys and t\u00adshirts advertising rock bands or football teams that were once destined for the shelves of a WalMart. These things that are consumed in the Global North are often not destroyed or recycled; the waste of plastics, clothes, toxic electronics, and other goods are packed in containers and simply dumped in the poorest parts of the world, overwhelming and often wreaking havoc on cultures and landscapes. The world of the readymade, what in the U.S. was once called \u201cstore\u00adbought,\u201d is at least as much of a reality as nature itself, and like nature, one can in recent years find it absolutely everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The flood of massproduced, cheap, consumable goods of all kinds has fundamentally transformed life. From the ancients through the romantics, most theories of art had something to say about holding a mirror up to nature. Nature was the world one found, and to live meant working directly with its raw materials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, for most of human history, it was impossible to live one\u2019s life without laboring, which often involved a fantastically hard process of finding, refining, and assembling the raw materials of nature to create a sustainable, inhabitable, and pleasant environment. People in the world did just this, and developed material cultures that looked very much like the places in which they lived. This work and the role of place and materials were reflected in the arts of every culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nature dominated theories of art in the West, and the point of art was to reveal the beauty and meaning of the world, particularly the natural world, by working through its elements. Starting with a block of stone, pigments suspended in oils, or even just ink and paper, the artist would recreate the beauty of the body, the color of sunlight on water, or rhyme the bitterness of death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rhythms of art were the changing seasons, its raw materials\u2013things everyone could understand because they shared profoundly in the experience of the given natural world. Rather recently, the literary critic Northrop Frye wrote a monumental theory of the world\u2019s literature, and his explanations were tied deeply to the rhythms of lives engaged closely to the demands and rhythms of the natural world. So much so that life and its literary mirrors and lamps could all be united in a universalized rhythm of four seasons, from birth in the spring to death in the winter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Such theories of mimesis and art from the ancients to contemporaries like Frye seem totally inadequate to the experience of big\u00adbox stores: places open day and night, flooded in artificial light, where the seasons do not change and the constant and total control of temperature, light, and every other aspect of the environment is regulated, seamless, and unvarying. Where classic shopping malls built by high modernists like Victor Gruen would incorporate water features and windows, Wal\u00adMart culture has dispensed with even such vestigial gestures to a natural world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The big\u00adboxes\u2019 relentless overhead lights shine down on industrial shelves at all times and the only mark of a changing season is to be found in the variance of seasonal goods being pushed. In the most insular enclaves of suburban living in the U.S., people buy the things of life ready\u00adto\u00aduse, most often ignorant of who made them, under what conditions, and at what cost. Consumers leave the stores in the artificial environments of their cars and return to homes similarly sealed and regulated, in which the rhythms of television more than the sun dictate everyday life. It is now possible to live much of one\u2019s existence in a totally ready\u00admade and controlled environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After all, the painter did not make the canvas and even the writer depended on the rag picker and the paper maker before the poet could write the lines. Yet the writer still faced a blank page as the painter a blank canvas: their materials may have been refined but they were not complete. To complete them, they applied their skills to transform the materials they found, and the transformation changed them, adding the value of their labor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Throughout, collage is central to understanding the development of the twentieth century because it is an uncanny mirror of both the Fordist production that characterized the first half of the century and the consumerist ethos that defined the postwar years. Fordism was premised on a vast fragmentation of holistically integrated methods of production. Every aspect … <\/p>\n