collage

Collage (From the French: coller, to stick) is regarded as a work of visual arts made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. This technique made its first appearance in the early 20th century as a groundbreaking novelty, however with the passing of time it's become ubiquitous.

For example, an artistic collage work may include newspaper clippings, ribbons, bits of colored or hand-made papers, photographs, etc., glued to a solid support or canvas.

Its adoption has crossed the boundaries of visual arts. In music, with the advances on recording technology, avant-garde artists started experimenting with cutting and pasting since the middle of the 20th century. However in the 1990's and 2000's it's completely apparent that "musical collages" have already become the norm for popular music, especially on rap, hip hop (rap-pop) and electronic music.

Collage in painting

Cubist painter, Pablo Picasso, invented the collage technique in 1912 with his Still Life with Chair Caning (Nature-morte à la chaise cannée)[1], in which he pasted a patch of oilcloth with a chair-cane design to the canvas of the piece.

Surrealist artists have made extensive use of collage. Cubomania is a collage made by cutting an image into squares which are then reassembled automatically or at random. Inimage is a name given by René Passerson to what is usually considered a style of surrealist collage (though it perhaps qualifies instead as a decollage) in which parts are cut away from an existing image to reveal another image.

Collages produced using a similar, or perhaps identical, method are called etrécissements by Richard Genovese from a method first explored by Marcel Mariën. Genovese also introduced excavation collage (that includes elements of decollage) which is the layering of printed images, loosely affixed at the corners and then tearing away bits of the upper layer to reveal images from underneath, thereby introducing a new collage of images. Penelope Rosemont invented some methods of surrealist collage, the prehensilhouette and the landscapade.

Collage was often called the art form of the 20th century, but this was never fully realised.

Surrealist games such as parallel collage use collective techniques of collage making.

Collage made from photographs, or parts of photographs, is called photomontage.

Another technique is that of canvas collage, which is the application, typically with glue, of separately painted canvas patches to the surface of a painting's main canvas. Well known for use of this technique is British artist John Walker in his paintings of the late 1970s, but canvas collage was already an integral part of the mixed media works of American artist Jane Frank by the early 1960s.

Decoupage

Decoupage is a type of collage usually defined as a craft. It is the process of placing a picture onto an object for decoration. Often decoupage causes the picture to appear to have depth and look as though it had been painted on the object.

The process is to glue (or otherwise affix) a picture to an object, then adding more copies of the picture on top, progressively cutting out more and more of the background, giving the illusion of depth in the picture. The picture is often coated with varnish or some other sealant for protection.

Wood collage

Wood collages are a relative novelty in the world of collages. Wood collage art usually features pieces of wood, wood shavings and scraps, assembled on an empty canvas of plywood or wooden board. Wood collages offer remarkable depth, textural variety and have a stunning 3-D quality about them. Most often, they also display a wide use of natural colors and textures of different kinds of wood.

Geeta Chaudhuri is a celebrated wood collage artist from India. Her works, called Artafar (i.e. art viewed from afar) represent some of the finest examples in wood collages. Visit www.artafar.com to view some of her works.

Digital collage

Digital collage is the technique of using computer tools in collage creation to encourage chance associations of disparate visual elements and the subsequent transformation of the visual results through the use of electronic media.

Digital collage artists

• Alejandro Puga
• Richard Genovese
• Zazie
• Istvan Horkay
• los ilustrados

Literary collage

Collage novels are books with images selected from other publications and collaged together following a theme or narrative (not necessarily linear).

The bible of discordianism, the Principia Discordia, is described by its author as a literary collage.

Legal issues

When collage uses existing works, the result is what copyright scholars call a derivative work. Both the derivative work and the originals have copyrights associated with them.

Due to redefined and reinterpreted copyright laws, and increased financial interests, some forms of collage art are all but outlawed in some media, for instance in the area of sound collage (hip hop music).

Examples of collage art that have run afoul of modern copyright are The Grey Album and Negativland's U2.

Regarding visual collages, there has been some attempt to argue that a consumptive use, in which one would purchase a copyrighted work and physically incorporate that purchased copy into a collage, is protected under the first-sale doctrine. This would seem to extend from the doctrine's guarantee that copyright holders cannot control what subsequently happens to lawfully purchased physical copies. A fair use argument could also be made as a consumptive use ensures that the copyright holder has been commercially compensated for every physical copy used. However, courts have not yet reached a consensus on this issue.

References

• Etrécissements by Richard Genovese
• Museum Factory -by Istvan Horkay
• History of Collage Excerpts from Nita Leland and Virginia Lee and from George F. Brommer
• West, Shearer (1996). The Bullfinch Guide to Art. U.K.: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 0-8212-2137-X.

See also

• Altered book
• Assemblage
• Décollage
• Found art
• Jiří Kolář
• List of pieces which use collage
• Mixed media
• Montage and musical montage
• Rodolfo Morales - Mexican painter and prominent user of collage as a medium
• Sound collage
• Papier collé

External links

• Custom Collage One of a kind Custom Collages.
• Canvas Collage One of a kind collages useing layers and layers of canvas.

• collageart.org, "A website dedicated to the art of collage.
• Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, the 2 Albums, "recomposed photographs", in a rather surrealist spirit.
• The International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction
• Artafar: Wood collages by Geeta Chaudhuri
• Works by Elliott Hundley
• Postcard Collage