While reading/looking at Ernst’s collages in Un Semain De Bonte, I had a hard time believing that the images were actually collage, and not just one drawing. I am really curious about Ernst’s creative process. How did he find images that went together so well? How did he make them fit together so seamlessly? Un Semain De Bonte is so unlike any other collages I’ve seen in that it does not appear to be collage at all. If Ernst’s goal was to make his collages not look like collages, why didn’t he just draw them in the first place?
Another thing that interested me was the socio-political commentary Ernst inserted into his collages. In combining different parts of images to make something entirely new, Ernst distorted common scenes of life and gave them weird and unsettling meaning. This idea of collage as way of making commentary is still present today. For example, the artist/rapper Yung Jake who creates intricate celebrity portraits entirely out of emojis.
Another example is the popular tv show South Park, which in its first few seasons was animated through a type of collage called stop motion cutout animation. South Park, like Un Semain De Bonte, is chalk-full of all type of commentary on today’s society. I am curious about what the deeper connection between collage and socio-political commentary is.
I completely agree with you on the seamless quality of Ernst’s work. I think I asked myself the same question — why not just draw it? My guess would be that the form of collage allows him to appropriate and make a commentary on Victorian ideals. I almost don’t know anything about the Victorian era, and am definitely interested in looking into it, because I feel like that will help me better understand Ernst’s work and why he chose to do it the way he did.
The examples you gave are really cool. The situation is a little different with Yung Jake — he *could* just paint portraits of celebrities in that style, but it would look pretty different I think, versus Ernst’s collages very much look like drawings. In any case, I think for both, the message is in the medium/material.