- Venue
- Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA)
- Location
- North East England
Transmitter/Receiver: The Persistence of Collage takes its title from Nicolas Bourriaud’s Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How art Reprograms the World (2001). Developing his earlier sentiments in Relational Aesthetics(1998), in which the passive/active binary, of the transmitter (artist) and receiver (viewer) are flouted when both are forced to collaborate to produce the art work itself, in this brief essay, Bourriaud suggests that, since the nineties, artists increasingly interpret, appropriate and remodel pre-existing work. DJ culture, he argues, is the musical equivalent. The DJ, like the artist, conceives linkages through which existing tracks or works can flow into each other. In art, this methodology is facilitated by developments in digital culture, the invention of new technologies, and the proliferation of images and material via the internet. In the essay accompanying the exhibition, Caroline Douglas, head of the Arts Council Collection from which all of the pieces were selected, describes collage as ‘the default medium of the twenty-first century’. She highlights how, through digital media and the internet, images generated by internet search engines form a sort of digital scrap book. These theoretical reflections frame the disparate accumulation of work in the show. Viewers are ushered away from a tendency to focus on the formal characteristics of collage as unusual juxtapositions of images and combinations of materials, towards a more critical appreciation of the way in which artists re-contextualise aspects of visual culture, art historical references, and found materials.
In the early twentieth century, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, amongst others, began experimenting with ways to break down and reconfigure images. Collage became a favoured medium of the avant-garde. It was a critical mode; a way to deconstruct, attack, and physically break down the notion of an autonomous work of art, which existed for its own sake, without any social or critical function. Collage blurs mediums; painting and sculpture can exist in a single work – suspending two and three dimensions simultaneously. As artists experimented with this notion, variations emerged including decoupage, photomontage, assemblage and the étrécissements of artists like Marcel Mariën, in which sections are removed rather than added.
Collage is typically associated with surrealist artists such as Eileen Agar, Ben Nicholson and Roland Penrose, who are all represented in the exhibition. The surrealist inspired experimentation of John Stezaker, who has five pieces in the show, demonstrates how artists can forge their own recognisable style in the way in which they choose to marry certain images. The subsequent reprisal of collage in sixties pop art is represented by Richard Hamilton’s Interior (1964 – 65). Yet, far from create an historical assessment of collage in twentieth century art, the primary aim of the show was to communicate the ‘persistence’ of the mode and an understanding of collage in an expanded sense.
As we enter the exhibition any notion of an historical overview is dispelled. Mark Titchner’s The Invisible Republic, 2006, consists of pilfered words and statements spliced together to create empty, abstract statements which are transposed onto psychedelic backgrounds of optical trickery. Across the room, David Batchelor’s I Love King’s Cross and King’s Cross Loves Me, 5,2001, is a sculptural installation of coloured panels which can be wheeled around and endlessly reconfigured. Visitors are encouraged to collect information on paper, creating their own scrap book which slots neatly into the exhibition catalogue. The exhibition is sound-tracked by Idris Khan’s A Memory… After Bach’s Cello Suites, 2006, which fades as you progress through the exhibition in a clockwise direction and becomes audible again as you loop back to the start.
The overtly political capability of collage is highlighted in the final room, in which artists such as Linder, Margaret Harrison and The Hackney Flashers use collage to highlight gender inequality. Set amongst these examples of more traditional collage, Steven Claydon’s film The Ancient Set, 2008, offers radical and exciting possibilities for the future and, undoubtedly, the persistence of collage in visual art.
