Collages are like dreams to me. A surreal assemblage or collection of haphazard images, symbols, texts, miniature 3Dish objects or materials, or just anything which can bring multiplicity and seemingly multiple dimensions to a unitary space. They are often deliberately cryptic, because your subconscious is a bitch like that. They are scattery, rarely restrained; they include various motifs, figural echoes, and symmetries and asymmetries. They are just these tapestries woven together with glue, countless images and consciousnesses, a showpiece of tangents.. this is how it reminds me of e2. The way it is tangential, if nothing else.
Everything is connected to the next thing
It is layered, like a dream.
Some of the images seem more concrete while others are more ambiguous. The concrete images often suggest present
and actual experience. Yet although they are in plain view, they may not be the focus of one's thoughts. The fainter images are more like fleeting thoughts, memories, or scenes that float through consciousness, but are diffcult to grasp hold of.. like memories of a dream or abstractions -- emotions for example. It's a presentation of simultaneous perceptions. Almost like a puzzle, but more tricky because your imagination must find the right pieces to fit, not merely your problem solving skills.
The way they most feel like a dream for me is the way they never seem to satisfy. They never make perfect sense, they come and go, never entirely gathering all the fragments into a reassuring whole. The best part is that you can be messy and junky and get glue in your hair, but remember what Max Ernst said:
‘Ce n’est pas la colle qui fait le collage.’
(‘It’s not the paste that makes the collage.’)”
I just love love love to be all sprawling and furious with that glue, with sequins, pins, magazines, paper words, letters, photographs, aluminum foil, random trinkets, springs, dead things; it all reveals the artist's appetite, a mingling of object and image.
Sometimes I think the earth is god's collage.
M. Stanton said: “In the future collage will be an important means of (self) education. We will all put the pieces of our case histories together and experiment with the simple process of splicing and superimposition, to reach, maybe, the margins of our expression.”
I have heard of an interesting psychotherapeutic method incorporating collages. It is called (appropriately enough) The Collage Method.This includes a progressive sequence of collage making activities and then correlated therapy and interviews. At first glance collages seem so simple that their significance easily escapes notice. However, collaging comprises an extended metaphor: essentially, they symbolise the growth of the human mind. Collages enable one to retrace the path by which their psyche developed in infancy, childhood, and adolescence.
But why is the Collage Method a psychotherapeutic technique? It functions in two ways simultaneously: it provides both an open format for personal expression, and an ordered sequence for structural transformation. This enables people to tell their personal stories in such a way that the stories open up, the elements become fluid and available to enter into new combinations, collage-maker becomes accessible to 'creative change'.
Information on The Collage Method came from http://www.frankolsonproject.org.