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Activities: Context Activities Collage: Putting the Pieces Together  Back to Context Activities
When young children cut pictures out of magazines and glue them haphazardly to poster board, they probably do not realize that their projects grow out of an artistic movement invested in an aesthetic of social change. Like performance art, assembly and collage have allowed artists to explore the ways in which individuals and communities negotiate radical societal changes. To create assembly pieces, which are usually three-dimensional, artists combine preexisting elements (e.g., furniture, garbage, food) to form new pieces. In the final "assemblies," the individual elements are usually recognizable, yet have been recontextualized to communicate new meaning. Collage uses similar techniques but in two dimensions. The artist's primary role is to "see" differently: he or she must recognize how unexpected combinations might work to reveal new perspectives on important issues. Collage, then, is a distinctly postmodern art form in that it allows its artists to transcend conventions and represent reality as shifting rather than stable. One collage master, African American artist Romare Bearden (1914-1988), was a cubist early in his career but had no formal artistic training. He brilliantly nuanced the collage form to represent the lives of African Americans in the twentieth century, confronting stereotypes during the civil rights movement by representing the complexities of the African American experience. While referencing the works of artists such as Picasso, he mixed genres (primarily painting and photography) and staked out a completely new African American artistic tradition by combining the imagery of two traditional African American imaginary homes: the rural South and the urban North (particularly Harlem). His works profoundly affected their viewers, many of whom found that his collages represented African American life even more accurately than representational photographs. In the years Bearden was painting, depictions of African Americans in the mainstream media frequently focused on the hardships of their daily lives, including poor education, violence at home and on the streets, and meager living conditions. Even those with the best intentions often saw African Americans as lacking basic necessities and skills. While Bearden did not ignore such difficulties in his art, he often chose to celebrate the unique, vibrant contributions of African Americans to broader currents of U.S. culture and society. His technique perhaps can best be understood in relation to another image of African American life in the mid-twentieth century. The photograph "Two Negro Houses" (1958) [7030] shows two Washington, D.C., houses in which African American families lived during the 1950s. The houses look old, broken down, and even premodern (the girl stands in front of an old-fashioned water well), emphasizing what these families lacked: proper housing, water, sanitation, and modern amenities. Bearden's paintings, however, consist of multiple overlapping images and focus on what black Americans had. For example, in "The Family" (1976) [6714] and "Playtime--Inner City" (1976) [6717], Bearden uses vibrant colors, and his images evoke the joys of music, family attachments, and play within African American communities. Significantly, his characters confront the viewer by staring directly out from the canvas: these are faces that show pride and vitality, not hopelessness. Like Bearden, writers use collage techniques to enhance readers' perceptions of American life. In "Recitatif," Toni Morrison's narration jumps back and forth in time as her main characters' lives intersect over many years. Just as Bearden leaves it to the viewer to decipher many details in his crowded paintings, Morrison never identifies the races of her main characters except to clarify that one is white and one is black. This information gap forces readers into the uncomfortable position of confronting their own stereotypes as they attempt to determine the race of each character. By overlapping different characters' versions of shared history, Morrison shows what can happen when two people's diverging memories of the same event bump up against each other. When Roberta and Twyla discover that they have startlingly different memories of an important event in their childhood, Twyla asks, "I wouldn't forget a thing like that. Would I?" Her uncertainty points to the story's theme--the insecurity and instability of memory--that is also conveyed formally via narrative collage. Similarly, Thomas Pynchon's style in "Entropy" also may cause discomfort for some readers, as the author zigzags between two narratives that occur simultaneously in the upstairs and downstairs apartments of the same house. It may seem that he has randomly cut and pasted two stories together, but close reading reveals that his placement of the textual elements is just as deliberate as Bearden's placement of images in his works. The effect is the same in literature as in visual art: the audience is forced to consider two seemingly unrelated images simultaneously. Thus, comments made by downstairs characters can help the reader to better understand upstairs characters, and vice versa. Mainstream culture also offers numerous examples of collage in action. One of the most familiar forms of pop-culture collage is usually illegal: for years, urban graffiti artists have used spray paint to decorate buildings, benches, buses and trains, and other public areas. Often, artists paint new images adjacent to or even on top of previous images, sometimes obliterating previous pictures, thus creating "collaborative" collages that change as the communities change. Sometimes called "train-bombing" by its New York City subway practitioners, this art form allows artists, working quickly to avoid detection by authorities, to use relatively inexpensive materials on the seemingly limitless canvas of urban objects. While graffiti artists have been active for decades, in recent years perhaps the most visible--or, rather, audible--form of popular collage has been the "sampling" practiced by hip-hop musicians. By inserting samples, or short "quotes," from other musicians' songs into their own compositions, musicians pay tribute to earlier musical styles while updating them for a new generation of listeners. Sampling produces effects in music similar to those of collage in visual art and literature: it unites ostensibly different (both racially and sonically) musical forms. For example, Puff Daddy (now P. Diddy) fused 1990s rap with 1970s hard rock when he sampled Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" in his 1998 song "Come With Me," which he performed on TV's Saturday Night Live with Zeppelin's Jimmy Page on guitar. Like artists such as Romare Bearden and writers who use collage-type layering in their narratives, hip-hop artists use "collage" in their music to build bridges between themselves and past masters, to show off their skills, and to express the diversity and energy of their communities. Questions
[6513] Pablo Picasso, A 1912 List, Written by Pablo Picasso, of European Artists to be Included in the Armory Show of 1913 (1912), courtesy of Walt Kuhn Family Papers and Armory Show Records 1882-1966, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Handwritten list of artists to be included in the Armory Show. Modernist writers and visual artists, including Dos Passos, Picasso, and Braque, used combinations of disparate pieces to create a whole image and message. [6714] Romare Bearden, The Family (1976), courtesy of the Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Romare Bearden gained international recognition for the powerful visual metaphors and probing analysis of African American heritage in his many collages, photomontages, watercolors, and prints. He was a member of the Harlem Artists Guild and had his first solo exhibition in 1940 at the age of twenty-nine. He had many equally distinguished friends, such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray. [6715] Romare Bearden, The Return of Ulysses (1976), courtesy of the Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Romare Bearden's painting and collages distinguished him within the twentieth-century African American aesthetic tradition. Derek Walcott's poem Omeros is a Caribbean retelling of the Odysseus (Ulysses) myth. Bearden often drew on his past in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, for his powerful images. [7030] Anonymous, These Two Houses Were Among the Structures in Washington, D.C. . . . (1958), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-124134]. These two Washington, D.C., houses were classed as "good enough" for occupancy by African Americans until they were demolished so that a housing project could be built in their place. In the foreground a young girl stands near an old wooden well. |
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