Images With(In) Books

I apologize in advance if this post is an incoherent ramble, but this has been sitting in the back of my mind for a while and I just wanted to put it out there. So… what do you guys think of collage as an expression of a stream of consciousness? I think that skimming through magazines, cutting out whatever expresses your thoughts/feelings and arranging the clippings on a blank page is a good way of recording that stream of thoughts and feelings; however, I also wonder if the extra time taken to hunt down and cut out specific images/words to accurately express one’s inner dialogue means that the process is stymied and no longer a continuous “stream” of consciousness.

During our collage session I was cutting out whatever images and words caught my eye, with no particular result in mind -does this mean that my collage was the expression of a stream of unconsciousness?

To me, it seems that there is a significant link between collage and the manipulative way the media presents the news sometimes. I also remember one of the first articles we read for Mitchell, Ekphrasis and the Other, which emphasized the inseparability of some artworks from topics related to socio-political, gender-related and racial issues.

The first time I viewed Une Semaine de Bonte, I did not know it was a collage, nor did I know what a collage is, but I thought that Ernst’s style is certainly very strange in the way he juxtaposes different drawings or illustrations. After realizing that Une Semaine de Bonte is a collage, it made sense to me that the exaggerated interactions between the characters seemed strange (like the woman lying in a bed with a man gazing at her from behind the bars of a cage P. 49), it also made sense that the scene itself was not conceived in Ernst’s mind, perhaps only an idea of the argument he wanted to convey. I thought it was extremely unlikely for someone to blend these elements from different worlds into one scene.

I think the idea of collage evokes the purposeful way the media spreads the news to fix certain arguments. The media present pieces of news in a certain proportion, the crew chooses the images very selectively depending on the reaction they would like to evoke from the audience and they place different degrees of emphasis on the different pieces of news in order to direct viewers’ attention in a certain way. For example, last week there was a major controversy in Egypt about the transition of two islands, Tiran and Sanafir, in the Red Sea from Egyptian to Saudi Arabian property, some people protested against this decision, which the President took without referring to the Parliament’s opinion. However, the Daily News on the Egyptian national TV channel only hosted some politicians and strategist thinkers to analyse the president’s decision in flowery language that praised the benefits such a decision contributes to Egyptian political situation! There was no mention of the protests or of opposing views to the President’s decision. In this sense, the media seeks to link the news it presents to ideas of approval or rejection, optimism or pessimism. 

I am truly intrigued by the ability of collage artists to juxtapose cultural and socio-political symbols in order to communicate their arguments effectively. Like the media, collage has the ability to make implicit links among many topics, which is why viewers need to be very careful in their assessment of collage works and the messages that they carry to society. Ernst does make a link to women as being used to men in power or very abusive of men’s sexual appeal to them. Till now, I am not sure if this is a critical argument or if he truly means to objectify women.

*Warning, this was a post that was sitting as a draft because I forgot to click publish. Feel free to ignore this this week*

I am happy that you made us pick up a Gorrey book. It wouldn’t have been an art book I think I would have ever picked up. It looks too dark for something for me to pick up as a kid, which is a good thing it seems. But there is this simplicity and lightness to the work that I believe calls for its best medium to be in animation. The short clip you showed in class of the beginning to the PBS mystery series demonstrated how naturally comedic Gorrey’s characters are. To leave them stagnate in the print almost does these wonderfully creepy and endearing characters a disservice. To animate them is to add a bit more absurdity: in the exaggerated stiff animation and the bright off kilter sound effects and musical background.

*Warning, this was a post that was sitting as a draft because I forgot to click publish. Feel free to ignore this this week*

It was actually the discussion we had on Monday in class that inspired my topic for my final paper for this class. I appreciated the discussion in which we commented on whether or not the female figure in Ernst’s Monday book has an agency of her own when her face is obscured by the shell. This to me spoke at the heart of what the surrealist movement is most about. The propagation of the stereotype of the femme-fatale and other sexualized images of the female identity were widely ingrained in surrealism. In fact, Salvador Dalí’s pieces, often promoted through a rather benign perspective of dreamscapes to audiences today, confront a deep seated fear of the female identity and her sexuality. His piece “The Great Masturbator” of 1929, depicts a monstrous glob of a female body painted with symbols the denote an inherent sexualization of the female and also a fear. Her face is drawn near the genitalia of a clothed but exposed male body (TANGENT: interesting thought, but again I would offer the idea that the headless male figure holds more agency that the bodiless figure of the woman. He stands erect and present where as the woman has her eyes closed and he head is cocked in a way that suggests she is begging or insatiably desiring the male form). By her breasts rests a lily, whose cylindrical crevice takes on the idenity of the vaginal canal. An army of ants walk along the folds of the mass from which the female protrudes, suggesting an unrelenting “itch” that needs to scratch. Yet amid these sexualized images, the perverse is not forgotten. A fly clutches the stomach region, performing fellatio on what can be construed as either an udder, a phallus, or a nose. A skeletal like man is painted in the desert background, appearing to have no understanding that this monster lives before him. This painting is rather disturbing, and so little discussed in the general teaching of surreality.

The collage workshop brought me back to my art classes in high school, middle school, and elementary school. The collage I created in class on Monday was not my first but was by far my most deliberate. Studying collage has given me a new outlook on what goes into making a collage, and what should ultimately come out. I think that my experiences with collages throughout the years follow an interesting trend. That is, my collages have become increasingly sophisticated. When I was in elementary school making a collage in art was a dream come true. I didn’t have to get marker all over my hands, or try to draw a good picture. Instead, I cut out scraps of paper, crinkled up pieces of tissue paper, curled up some colorful pipe cleaners and mindlessly glued these objects to a piece of paper. Of course, I never neglected to cover the entire page with glitter when I was finished.

As I graduated to middle school and high school my ideas began to manifest themselves in my collages, but my juxtaposition was nothing to write home about. In 10^th grade, I created a collage of newspaper articles and pictures regarding 9/11. Our prompt for the project was to create something, in memoriam of 9/11. My collage integrated many powerful pictures and certainly accomplished the goal of the assignment. However, my placement of images on the page followed no particular pattern and was far from deliberate. Inspired by Max Ernst’s seamless collages in Une Semaine de Bonte, I took to collage once more this past Monday. For the first time in my life I created a collage with deliberate selection of the images and their placement on the page. The components of my collage combined into a single scene, and while my scene was not nearly as seamless as one made by Ernst, I attempted to tell a story with my placement of pictures. My juxtaposition was deliberate rather than haphazard, and my message was likely much more clear. This course has taught me a lot about art history, but I am also learning a great deal about myself as an artist. I once thought I could only become better at art if I practiced and practiced. While that may be the case for my execution, I think the commentary in my art can be improved upon without even picking up a pencil, or a pair of scissors. For example, as my story about my progression of collaging suggests, simply learning about Ernst allowed me to improve. Such phenomena remind me of the value of a liberal arts education. Indeed, what I learned in the classroom made my art better. In fact, much of what I learn in seemingly unrelated classes has proven to have fascinating connections.

Yesterday’s workshop was a good reminder of the amount of work it takes to make a collage. I mentioned before my amazement that Ernst made his book in three weeks, but actually attempting to make my own was a reminder of just how impressive Ernst’s work is. It was a fun experience to browse through magazines looking for images that would work well together in a collage. I became more aware of how much precision is required in cutting to get a good image that doesn’t look like it’s been pulled from multiple sources. Frequently the images in magazines have text or other things on the image that aren’t necessarily something I would want to include in my print, so I had to make choices of whether to try to cut out the object or leave it in the image and put it into my collage. I also thought about the fact that since we were using many different magazines, the sizes of images varied. In some pictures the people were the main focus of the page and in others they were in the background. Finding images that work together spatially and proportionally takes a lot of work if you’re looking to make a cohesive, consistent image. This workshop gave me even greater appreciation for Ernst’s work.

As I’ve learned from many of our workshops, the creating art is a lot more time consuming and difficult than it looks. I absolutely loved the collage workshop, largely because it is something that I used to do often when I was younger. In the past, my collages were just pasted images cut from magazines that I liked. I found it a lot more difficult to pull images from magazines and books that have to relate to the scene I am trying to depict, Dracula waking from his tomb. I found that it was hard to recreate such a specific scene with the content in a magazine. I think I am going to end up drawing or selecting and printing the more specific images (like Dracula and a tomb). I have also never made a collage with tissue paper and streamers before, but I really liked the way that it looked on the page, though it was hard to glue down. I think the prettiest collages are made by layering mediums, though this is the most time consuming. I am glad we are starting this final project early!

During the workshop today, I discovered something about Ernst’s collages. While creating my own collage, I realized that many of the pieces that I cut out I was giving new meaning to. For instance, I cut out a clown from a rather harmless children’s book. His face in my collage now looks like one of satirical nature. It goes to show that objects out of context have their meaning redefined. Which made me think about Ernst’s collages. For all I know, Ernst was collecting images of animals from a Charles Darwin book. Ernst then repurposed possibly harmless images to something of a satirical or horrific nature. I think it would be interesting to know where Ernst got his images from. In the collage I created today, almost all of my images were from the same text, one about nature. However, when I reorganized the images from a book of nature, I made a commentary about the destruction of nature by humans. I just found that I would be interesting to see if Ernst might have done something similar giving even more, commentary on already fascinating images.

I can’t believe I had never heard of Amphigorey (or even Edward Gorey) before in my life, because I think his work is fantastic. The Object-Lesson is one I find especially mysterious, because things seem to happen randomly, completely without order or reason. Maybe there is a comment somewhere in there about our society and how we act and react crazily to things we shouldn’t (Madame O flings herself over the parapet after realizing that her cousin’s mustache is not his own). One page reads, “On the shore a bat, or possibly an umbrella, disengaged itself from the shrubbery, causing those nearby to recollect the miseries of childhood.” In class we learned that Gorey was very uncomfortable around children, which makes me wonder what his childhood was like. Although I hope he didn’t personally connect to the grim fates presented in The Gashlycrumb Tinies, something must have inspired him to view kids as vulnerable to horrible experiences.