Strange Glue (Collage & Installation)

COLLagE at 100

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COLLagE at 100

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Strange Glue

(Collage & Installation)

Curated by Todd Bartel Thompson Gallery, The Cambridge School of Weston Published on the occasion of the exhibition Strange Glue (Collage & Installation) December 19, 2012 – February 22, 2013 © Thompson Gallery, The Cambridge School of Weston Design Todd Bartel Printed on demand by Lulu.com Essay and forward © 2012 Todd Bartel Edited by Eli Keehn Photos © 2012 provided by the artists Exhibition photography © Todd Bartel All rights reserved The Cambridge School of Weston 45 Georgian Road Weston, MA 02493 Cover, end pages and page 15: Todd Bartel, Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1923-36 (Blank Slates—History of Collage Series), 2012, digitally generated, laser-cut collage (cut at Kennedy Fabrications, New York, NY), on Rives BFK, mounted on museum board, 22 x 30 inches Page 18: Todd Bartel, Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912 (Blank Slates—History of Collage Series), 2012, Rives BFK with digitally generated, laser-cut collage (cut at Kennedy Fabrications, New York, NY), mounted on museum board, 22 x 30 inches

Thompson Gallery 4

Collage at 100 Fall: Strange Glue (Traditional & Avant-garde Collage) Winter: Strange Glue (Collage & Installation) Spring: Michael Oatman (Another Fine Mess) Collage at 100 is a three-part, yearlong exhibition series that celebrates the centennial of the appearance of collage in painting. In its first 100 years, collage has become ubiquitous within contemporary art and culture and its myriad applications have expanded its original definition to become the most inclusive of artistic processes. Strange Glue (Collage & Installation), the second show in the series, looks at the work of twenty-seven artists whose practices push beyond collage’s flatness and embrace the physicality of architecture.

ABOUT THE THOMPSON GALLERY The Thompson Gallery is a teaching gallery at The Cambridge School of Weston dedicated to exploring single themes through three separate exhibitions, offering differing vantages of the selected topic. Named in honor of school trustee John Thompson and family, the Gallery promotes opportunities to experience contemporary art by local, national and international artists and periodically showcases the art of faculty, staff and alumni. The Gallery is located within the Garthwaite Center for Science and Art, The Cambridge School of Weston, 45 Georgian Road Weston, MA 02493. M–F 9–4:30 p.m. and by appointment (school calendar applies). Visit thompsongallery.csw.org to view exhibit art.

ABOUT THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF WESTON The Cambridge School of Weston, located in a Boston suburb, is a progressive, coeducational, day and boarding school for grades 9 through 12, and post graduate.

Established in 1886, the school is dedicated to fostering individual strengths and deep, meaningful relationships through a wide range of challenging courses and a variety of teaching styles. csw.org

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COLLagE at 100

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Strange Glue

(Collage & Installation)

December 19, 2012 - February 22, 2013

Jo Ann Block • Rose DeSiano • Erin Elizabeth • Cianne Fragione • Chris Freeman ‘80 Brian Christopher Glaser • Aspen Golann ‘05 • Rachael Gorchov • Rachel Hibbard Craig Hill • Wes Kline • Sharon Koelblinger • China Marks • Paul Matosic • Jon McAuliffe John McCaughey • Carmelo Midili • Jánis Nedéla • Debra Olin • Katherine Powers Gerri Rachins • Alex Rheault • Alison Safford • Kendall Schuller Leslie Vigeant • Debra Weisberg • Claire Zitzow

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Foreword/acknowledgments

...made for a particular place, so much so that it cannot easily be moved because the work is not an object but is attached to the surroundings.

Duke Family Portrait, Photograph of Astronaut Charles Duke’s family left on Descartes Highlands, photographed

by Charles Duke Moss Duke, Jr., Apollo 16 lunar expedition, April 16 – 27, 1972, photographs courtesy of NASA

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Though seemingly shocking in its revolutionary appearance by comparison with painting and sculpture, installation has always been with us. For instance, when artists painted on the walls of the caves in Lascaux, they were creating a variation of what is known as site-specific installation: art that is made for a particular place, so much so that it cannot easily be moved because the work is not an object but is attached to the surroundings. i Mark Rosenthal

Almost two years before I put out the call for collage-based art in the summer of 2011, I invited several artists, who I knew worked in the installation format, to send me examples of their work. I also asked them to apply to the call for art once that was ready. When the call was formally announced, I hoped I would receive applications that involved installation art, but I did not want to take any chances, and so I padded my applications with known practitioners of installation art. To my surprise, however, I received more installation-based applications than anticipated, many of which pushed at even my own boundless definition of collage. By the end of the process, I had accepted 27 works that allowed me to make a case for exploring the relationship and transition between collage and installation.

It seems strange to take stock now, as I finish up the Strange Glue portion of Collage at 100.

By the end of this series of exhibitions, I will have worked on these shows for three years— three times as long as any other series I have developed—but still, the energy wells up in me to continue working to understand collage. It is a daily practice, something always needing doing, something always on the horizon. I am frankly surprised that I have come so far in this large undertaking. Then again, I have been studying the history of collage and have been a practitioner of collage since the early 1980s. I knew in the late 1990s that I wanted to do something to mark the hundredth anniversary of the invention of collage in the field of painting, and most everyone who

knows me has heard me talk and muse about the project. Even stranger, though, is the thought that I am exactly fifty years younger than the inception of collage into modern art’s vernacular.

Picasso created Still Life with Chair Caning in May of 1912; I was born in July of 1962. I made my first collage in 1981, which makes me a secondgeneration collage artist at best. However, I have witnessed many developments Picasso and Braque would never see. I was a year old when Braque passed away, and I had not yet turned eleven the year Picasso died. I wonder: Did they recognize their handiwork in the early installations that popped up between the World Wars? Braque would not live to see the early installations of the mid-1960s, but surely Picasso lived long enough to hear the phrase “installation art” uttered by artists and critics alike in the early 1970s.

I can’t really claim to be a historian of collage, although I wish I could. I will have to leave that role to others far more qualified. However, I have been thinking about collage and studying it for thirty years, and it has taught me more than all of my teachers combined. I must say, though, that in all my observation, creation, pedagogy, and reading, I simply have not found in any book or collection of books what I have come to understand about the power of collage.

I have discovered many wonderful quotes and ideas that I can use to make my case for these shows, but nothing that completely matches my own understanding of the power, the reach, the depth and breadth of the “revolution of papier collé,” to borrow Dianne Waldman’s quiet but potent phrase. That in itself may explain why I am writing this forward at 2:13 AM on a Monday morning, on the first school day of the new year, when I have already set my alarm to 4:30 AM so I can get up to finish writing my grades and comments for the previous module. I just could not sleep tonight!

About four summers ago I happened upon a wonderful book of NASA photography by Michael 11

Light called Full Moon in a used bookstore in Maine, which I promptly added to my library.

In the store, I remember stopping on page 58 and closing the book, saying to myself, “Collage is on the moon!” I was haunted by the idea of extraterrestrial collage. An astronaut thought to bring a photograph on an expedition to the moon, put it on the ground, and then snapped a photo of it in situ. In fact, the thought of it is what kept me awake this morning. It just popped into my head again as I lay down to sleep, probably because I recently came upon the image again during my research for the Collage at 100 exhibition series.

I had found the NASA archive online—a scanned photograph, taken by Charles Duke during the Apollo 16 lunar expedition (April 16 – 27, 1972), which he left on the surface of the moon—and I copied it to my desktop, happy to learn more about the image. I have in my possession a book and a digital copy; the actual family snapshot is there now, gravity keeping it in place on the moon’s surface. The moment I re-connected with Duke’s photograph online, I recalled my thoughts about it being a collage gesture. The thought of it being a work of collage has been swimming around in my head these past several months, but this morning, I realized it was also something more. It is not just that it is a piece of paper with an image burned into it by light, which stretches the definition of collage perhaps a bit too far. It’s not just that there is also a photo of a photo, which as documentation is also a kind of photo-collage. And it’s not just that the initial photograph itself is inserted into a plastic baggie, which in itself is another kind of collage. It’s that the bagged photograph does not belong on the surface of the moon. Moreover, to get it there, a human being, depending on a lot of complicated history and technology, imported it and essentially glued it to the moon. And so as I laid my head on my pillow this morning, it occurred to me that Duke’s actions were two things in one: collage and site-specific installation art—a thought worth getting out of bed to interject into this text.

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What a strange glue to consider. Gravity is so omnipresent that most of us rarely think about it as being a peculiar kind of glue. That’s when it hit me: How could such an odd happenstance— stumbling on the Duke family portrait on the surface of the moon—cause someone to identify the impetus of collage as the culprit?

Collage is a great teacher, modeling openness while offering lessons in contrast, unity and inclusion. Being open to its lessons has offered me an extraordinary point of view, which in turn I have attempted to share through these exhibitions. The power of collage’s inclusivity has been a vital prospect. I have worked with collage in so many of its derivations that my appreciation for its ceaseless reaches is vastly broader than its definition originally allowed. That fact alone set my heart in motion to see if it might be possible to add to its definition in a formal sense. I wanted to shift the definition—expand it—because of what it has taught me. And that project seemed worthy of a prolonged, rigorous examination.

But can someone like me—an artist and a high school teacher, who happens to also be a gallery curator—actively call for the definition of collage to expand? Does my pedigree preclude me from having the grounds to make the claim that, as a culture, we need the definition of collage to evolve? That thought too kept me awake, and though there is a risk in developing the ideas for this exhibition from the point of view of being an artist and a teacher, this examination nevertheless is an attempt to ground the implications of collage’s farthest reaches with historical reference.

In his book Understanding Installation Art, Mark Rosenthal credits the Lascaux Cave as an example of early installation art. He makes a great point: that the impetus to drag charcoal and other pigments over the interior surface of a cave wall is installation art and that we have been doing installation for as long as we can find a record of ourselves on the planet.ii From the dusty surfaces of cave walls to the desert surface of the moon,

we have brought things to spaces that change them conceptually, visually, and emotionally. For me, the act of importing an image onto another surface is not only an act of installation art; it is an act of collage. Think of a temporary tattoo applied to the skin: isn’t that a collage, albeit an impermanent one? Surely if the Lascaux cave paintings are installation art, than the Duke family portrait is also a site-specific installation.

Installation art involves so much more of life than the confines of paper alone can provide. But both fuse in a compelling way on our distant satellite, and that fusion is at the heart of this exhibition subject.

I will never forget the moment, as a college student years ago, when I was working on a flat collage and I had my first impulse to add an object to the surface of my work. The move from collage to assemblage is as natural as it is for assemblage to call into the realm of possibility whole rooms filled with things. Because of the strangeness of these above ideas, this exhibition sets out to explore how collage and installation are not only related, but connected to the same history.

I would have loved to write about each artist’s work in the text of this catalog’s essay—not to mention the previous two catalogs—but with 200 artists in the overall series, that was clearly not practically possible. There is nevertheless an important trend among several artists in the show, in terms of how they approach collage and installation, that needs to be acknowledged. Read the materials listings! Many artists in Strange Glue (Collage & Installation) transform or reuse found materials, and indeed, such materials inspire their work. Not all the artists push ecology as a major theme, but the transformation and/or the incorporation of the found object changes the way the work is viewed and experienced. Some artists are inspired by particular spaces or opportunities, and all works in the show engage with sculptural spaces as they are made with composite materials

and/or composite imagery. It is also important to acknowledge that many works can be placed in more than one category of installation; readers are encouraged to contemplate the various categories of installation explored in this catalog and consider how many works can fit comfortably into more than one designated genre.

I am grateful for the support of the participating artists, who also believe in the lineage of collage and installation and have loaned their work for this exhibition. I am grateful for my family, who continues to support me during long hours on the computer and away from home. I would like to thank NASA for their permission to use Charles Duke’s photographs in this publication. I am particularly grateful to Eli Keehn, my temporary editor, who in a moment’s notice stepped in to assist me with all matters grammatical and who supported this project with the utmost professionalism, expertise and timeliness. I deeply appreciated his guidance and good sense. My heart goes out to Naomi Mayer, my editor of ten years, whose father’s passing is the source of much personal sorrow for her at this difficult time.

Finally, I would like to thank the students, faculty and staff of The Cambridge School of Weston for their appreciation of my work as a curator.

Their praise for and interest in these shows has been a source of great happiness and continued inspiration.

Todd Bartel January 6, 2013

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i. Mark Rosenthal, Understanding Installation Art, Prestel, New York, 2003, p. 23 ii. ibid, p. 23

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Is it a genre? Is it a medium? Is it an exhibition ordisplay, a curatorial practice: to install?

Marga van Mechelen, 2006

I like to think of installation art as maximum collage.

Michael Oatman, ca. 1998

The covers of this book are too far apart.

Ambrose Bierce, ca. 1900

Strange Glue (Collage & Installation) is the second of three exhibitions in the Collage at 100 series, and the second and final part of the Strange Glue theme. It assembles the work of 27 artists whose art pushes beyond traditional collage practices to involve installation-based strategies. Although this exhibition is not intended as an examination of installation art per se, the show contains several installations, some of which are site-specific to The Cambridge School of Weston. The show was organized to expose some of the ways that collage, with its expanding set of strategies, easily moves past the flat realm of twodimensional paper and into the third and fourth dimensions.

Not normally discussed as works of collage, installation art nevertheless owes a debt of gratitude to its parent medium. Thus, this exhibition aims to show the linkage between the flat realm of traditional college and the spatial dimensions of assemblage and installation.

For example, some works in this exhibition are delicate or oversized and require multiple people to mount them. Some works are built to float off the wall, while others are drawn and collaged directly onto it, or even cut into it. Some works require large areas or entire rooms.

Others involve specific spatial requirements or specialized hardware for hanging. There are works that intervene upon specific architectural elements to activate seldom-used locations, such as an outside or inside corner of a room.

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There are works that do not require walls, but usurp other surfaces such as windows, floors or ceilings. And some works are demanding to install due to the sheer number of components involved. To be fair, the exhibition contains artwork that could easily have been included in the first show. The presence of such work bridges the gap between the two parts of Strange Glue: the inherently flat, traditional modes of collage, and the inherently sculptural modes of assemblage and architectural encroachment. Regardless of the different ways in which the works interface with architecture, all the work exhibited embodies collage methods and attitudes, and demonstrates the plasticity of collage.

As discussed in the essays accompanying the first exhibition, Strange Glue (Traditional & Avant-garde Collage), and its Virtual Annex, the original definition of the word “collage” is now obsolete. The term has evolved to embrace a much broader meaning, reflecting an everexpanding attitude towards bringing together any set of disparate things. This shift not only emancipates collage from its formerly rigid definition of glued paper, but also incorporates into the definition the sculptural forms of assemblage and installation art. Given that the first credited collage is also an assemblage, this changing definition should not come as a complete surprise. However, the inclusion of installation art into collage vernacular does not conclude the reaches of the definition. An art form that fuses the distinctions between flat and spatial, collage and construction, object and space, and sculpture and architecture requires viewers to move among artworks as they inhabit space—to in effect become a living part of the work. It is inevitable that some new derivation or some new kind of expansion will evolve in the near future. With this in mind, Strange Glue (Traditional & Avant-garde Collage) considers the first hundred years of collage practice and asks: what is it about collage that allows it to 20

embrace such inclusiveness?

From Collage to Installation: The New Realism I am a painter and I nail my pictures together.

Kurt Schwitters, 1919

Painting relates to both art and life.

Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)

A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric. A canvas is never empty.

Robert Rauschenberg, 1959

Elitism versus populism, high versus low, avantgarde versus kitsch, individual creativity versus mass production—the distinction between the aesthetic space of art and the social space of the world around us has been drawn throughout this century with a variety of faces.

Michael Archer, 1994

How did the practice of painting evolve into installation art? Why can installation art be understood as an expanded mode of collage?

Although the debate about the birth of installation art remains an open topic and the exercise of condensing history runs the risk of oversimplification, several key events and creations during collage’s hundred-year tenure offer insight into the above questions. Michael Archer points out that “installation, as a hybrid discipline, is made up of multiple histories; it includes architecture and Performance Art in its parentage, and the many directions within contemporary visual arts have also exerted their influence.”1 Archer’s timeline, however, does not even mention collage. Art historians commonly accept that collage ushered in and transformed modernism in pervasive ways. But what inroads can be said to have inspired the evolution from flat depictions of the world into experiential environments? That question is central to this segment of the Strange Glue centennial reflection.

If we imagine modernism as having paved a road between single-point-of-view traditional canons of representation (naturalism) and contemporary art’s myriad and pluralistic approaches to depicting the world (maximum collage, to borrow Michael Oatman’s phrase), the early trailblazers who carved out the path would merit special markings along the way.

Surely, there are thousands of stones laid in that path, but only a few contributions are significant enough to warrant the placement of flagstone markers—stepping stones that not only recall key moments, personages, significant works, and influential ideas, but also inspired widespread application of such ideas.

Four such stones warrant mention.

Bricolage, 1912 Picasso and Braque had an art term for when they used whatever was on hand; they called such material, and the process of using it, “bricolage.” Their attitude toward using available things is what opened the way to the use of collage in fine art in the first place. Indeed, as Brandon Taylor points out in his book Collage: The Making of Modern Art, it was Picasso’s “passion for impersonation” and his “powers of invention” that led to his “expedient use of the wrong materials” to both describe and confound forms. When Picasso pasted a piece of oil cloth depicting chair caning onto the canvas of “the first literally collaged work in modern Western art,” his action was a natural extension of his well-exercised bricoleur attitude. Taylor emphasizes, “bricolage was a working-man’s ethic, and Picasso was forever keen to demonstrate that aesthetic value can be contrived out of unlikely means.”2 If Picasso’s pasted and over-painted fragment of oil cloth in his Still Life with Chair Caning (May 1912) was the first stone that led artists toward encroaching upon the environs of life, Braque’s invention of papier collé using fragments of wallpaper (early September 1912) was the second stone laid. Braque and Picasso fought

over who deserved the initial distinction for being first to use collage in fine art, leaving history to grant two separate, but key markers.

As the originators of fine art collage, there is little dispute about Picasso’s and Braque’s contributions to expanded painting, but their attitudes toward infusing bric-a-brac into art is rarely credited as the cornerstone that allowed artists to venture into truly spatial territory.

Readymade, 1913 Although not a painting per se, Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913) could be considered the third stone in the path. Duchamp initially called the work a “readymade,” but later recanted the designation, deeming Bicycle Wheel an “assisted readymade” instead— because he altered both parts of the sculpture when he combined them. By taking an ordinary kitchen stool and affixing a fork and bicycle wheel to its seat, Duchamp, like Picasso and Braque, broke the rules of traditional art by using things he did not initially make. Taking ordinary objects out of context, combining them—thereby destroying their usefulness—and then installing the final product in his studio apartment led Duchamp to revise the idea of the readymade: a single object, not made by an artist, designated as a work of art. That concept ultimately became a celebrated milestone of 20th century art. Given that the base of Bicycle Wheel is a piece of household furniture, Duchamp’s sculpture can be thought of as a proto-installation piece, placed into a domestic setting.

Though not usually grouped together, Picasso, Braque and Duchamp should arguably be given group credit as the triumvirate provocateurs of modernism. Duchamp’s contribution remains so controversial that we are still analyzing and discussing the concept of the readymade today. Though the impetus for these initial stepping stones are different, each involves the melding of art and life—pulling everyday 21

objects into the work of art. For Picasso in particular, but also Braque, bricolage allowed for “clever bluff and counterfeit, for expedient and often jocular impersonation of the pictorial by the real.”3 For Duchamp, including everyday objects in the work of art was the antidote to the problem of “retinal painting,” which aims at the aesthetic depictions of the semblance of things; he was against painting things for aesthetic purposes and was interested in using painting as an “intellectual tool. 4” Incorporating everyday objects replaced the act of creating semblances, with the incorporation of artifacts from the quotidian—the shock of the actual things not made by the artist—alleviating the problem by putting, as Duchamp is often quoted, “painting once again to the service of the mind.”5 Duchamp’s conceptual contributions would become a significant guideline to lay a much longer path away from traditional painting, toward a method of making art that was far more inclusive of the world. By the time Duchamp was designating his early readymades, however, the world was in turmoil.

The First World War (1914 - 1918) intervened and literally tore apart Europe, sending artists into battle or seclusion. Ironically, the war too would become another stepping stone, albeit a stone laid out of anger, horror and outrage.

Painted the same year as the end of the war, Duchamp’s last painting, TU ‘M (1918) is both a painting and an assemblage which catalogs many of his ideas about painting.

Interestingly, TU ‘M contains painted shadows of many of his most famous readymades. One of the painting’s most prominent features is the world’s first depiction of industrial color swatches6—readymade colors. It also has an image of a pointing hand, painted by a commercial sign painter; a painted tromp l’oeil crack in the middle portion of the painting to which Duchamp affixed actual safety pins as if to suture the crack; and an actual bottle cleaner, which pierces the void of the painted crevasse 22

while harkening to another early readymade.

It is important to note the breadth of Duchamp’s use of readymades in this painting: readymade objects (one of which points to an earlier readymade while doubling as a new readymade), illusory paintings of readymade paint swatches, and a readymade image painted by someone other then himself. His painting, like his readymades, further reinforced his prescient call for bringing everyday objects into modern art.

Merz, 1918 During the same year as Duchamp’s final painting, another flagstone was added to the path by Kurt Schwitters, a prominent collage artist who coined the term Merz to describe the nuanced way he made his art. For Schwitters, Merz was the process of making art by combining fragments of detritus, but with a chilling reminder of whence such scraps came.

Schwitters explains: In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready....

Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz.7

In just a few short years after the war, Schwitters not only developed his ideas for Merz in painting and collage form, but also outfitted whole rooms with faceted objects.

Kurt Schwitters was not the first artist to create a work of installation art—Vladimir Tatlin’s Model for a monument to the Third International, Moscow (1919-20) and El Lissitzky’s Proun Room (1923) are often credited with that distinction. Schwitters’ overall contributions are significant for how they all relate and build off each other. Schwitters’ ideas about combining bits of life into his flat collages, his term for that activity (Merz), and the fact that he eventually applied his ideas about his Merz process to

sculptural practices that ultimately intervened within interior spaces make Schwitters the first artists to bridge the gap between painting, collage, assemblage and installation. In 1923, Schwitters expanded his practice by working directly on the walls, floor and ceiling of his family home in Hanover, Germany. He called the work Merzbau—the icon selected to represent this exhibition’s card, ads and posters—and he worked on it actively between 1923 and 1937.

According to some sources, Schwitters filled about six rooms with collaged and assemblaged materials before the home was destroyed in 1943, during a bomb raid. For Schwitters, Merz was not limited to flat materials; Merzbau is a spatial extension of the impulse to collage.

Schwitters was an outspoken artist, and his influence was prominent throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But it was not until a little after his death in 1948 that the next flagstone could be said to have been installed. Dada, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism would occupy artists and culture from the war years until the mid-1950s, and each art historical genre would heavily incorporate collage into its practices without taking up installation per se. However, in 1942 Andre Breton organized a retrospective exhibition of Surrealist art titled First Papers of Surrealism. For a vernissage, Marcel Duchamp created a temporary installation—or rather an intervention—called the Mile of String, in which the artist organized a tangled web of string connecting all the art and objects in the room, making it difficult for the guests to walk through the space and see the paintings on display.

Despite such an obvious fusion of objects, space, art and life, it wasn’t until the days of Pop Art when a new set of artists would pick up Duchamp’s guideline again and lay the next stepping stone in the path heading toward the widespread applications of installation art.

Combines, 1955 As a movement, Pop Art—which was named for a visual cue in a collage by Richard Hamilton, entitled Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956)— was the perfect art-historical movement to promote the last of the four stepping stones needed for collage to give way to installation art practices. Even in its name, the idea to incorporate household materials in the work of art was implicit. Not surprisingly, Pop Art was an art that widely spread the concept of importing pieces of the world into its art objects. While many Pop artists can be cited for including objects in their work, including such seminal artists as Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, and Edward and Nancy Reddin Keinholz, it was Robert Rauschenberg whose blatant use of everyday things would capture the art world’s interest in the incorporation of everyday things into the works of high art. Rauschenberg’s early Combine Paintings (1954-1962),or Combines, are the capstone that put collage only a step away from installation art.

In Rauschenberg’s Combines his audiences find the shock of familiar objects: a bed, a ladder, clocks, chairs, taxidermy animals, anything and everything. It was not just that Rauschenberg was a prolific bricoleur, who combed the streets of New York for its abundance of discarded objects. Rauschenberg’s art was widely successful and widely discussed, and the artist was often quoted. Being in the public spotlight is probably what pushed his work above others to challenge and expand convention. About his Combines, Rauschenberg once said, “I think a picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world.”8 The Combines were the residue of the artist trying to “act in the gap between art and life.”9 Although Rauschenberg is talking about painting in his quintessential quote, collage is implicit.

What he points out to us turns out to be the ultimate reason why collage is by far the most 23

democratic and expansive of artistic processes.

As Rauschenberg once said, “After you recognize that the canvas you’re painting on is simply another rag, then it doesn’t matter whether you use stuffed chickens or electric light bulbs of pure form.”10 Rauschenberg painted Monogram between 1955 and 1959. The moment when Rauschenberg put a painting on the floor beneath a face-painted taxidermy goat, with a car tire painted white along its tread placed round the body of the goat, the entire world of objects and materials— beyond traditional paint—became art’s extended palette. Media-driven Pop Art was the vehicle that publicly pushed the concept that so many artists before Rauschenberg had been talking about. Within the first fifty years of collage experimentation, artists had contributed new words and ideas to traditional approaches to art making, ideas not only central to collage practices but which in turn expanded collage into installation.

Bricolage, Readymade, Merz and Combines all share the fundamental idea of importing artifacts into the work of art; by the 1960s, such incorporation was not at all novel. But during the 1960s, with upheaval in so many other cultural areas, the practice of bridging art and life became the subject of much public discourse, transforming the new expanded realism into a household concept and a common idea. Indeed, it was only a few short years later when artists began exploring and incorporating the environment—as it was then called—within the lexicon of the creative act. For example, the early installation by Wolf Vostell, 6 Television Dé-coll/age, (1963), was comprised of several televisions stacked on other televisions or file cabinets each with a separate channel running, allowing for spectator involvement. Joseph Kosuth made his seminal One and Three Chairs in 1965. Lucas Samarus created Mirror Room in 1966. And by the time Walter De Maria 24

installed The New York Earth Room in 1977 and Judy Chicago had completed The Dinner Party in 1979, “Installation Art” had become a vernacular term.

Strange Glue Other than the obvious differences of scale and encroachment, installation art differs from traditional collage work in a number of important ways. Installation art is rarely framed as traditional works of art are framed.

Put another way, installation art is framed by its environs. Context is a strange and powerful glue. It informs the work, changes how it is viewed. But because of how it is framed, installation art is more often than not ephemeral and rarely lasts longer than the dates of its exhibition. Typically, installation art is not portable in the same way that framed art is portable, because the situation of one space verses another inevitably changes the way a piece is custom fit; the same piece exhibited in two different places can be completely different experiences. Often, a work of installation art has to be completely reconfigured if it is to travel.

Moreover, installation art is often destroyed when the exhibition is over, and documentation of how it looked remains its only record.

Although there are only a few examples of the type of installation art that causes viewers to blur the distinction between art and life, Strange Glue (Collage & Installation) examines work that gradually shifts from one extreme of collage to the other: from the flat to the spatial, from the definite to the ephemeral. With the exception of two interesting cases, the work in Strange Glue (Collage & Installation) is not framed in the traditional sense. One exception is a series of framed collages that form a block of frames, spaced at regular intervals, which need to be considered as an overall group.

The other example is a work in which several metal frames have been welded together in a

conglomerate assemblage of frames anchored to the wall at a single point, which allows the work to pivot slightly. In both cases framing can be thought of as architectural encroachment.

While the configuration of some pieces may be the only time they will ever be shown in a particular manner, other works—provided the right criteria is present—can generally be seen in similar configurations. There are three works in the show that will be destroyed or partially destroyed when the show is over. There is a particular work in the show that could not be included in its physical form because of space constraints and is exhibited instead via video.

Another work exhibited is shown as a video because it’s the documentation of its original in situ configuration. While none of these kinds of issues generally arise for flat works of collage, the versatility of collage allows for such situations.

As we have seen from one show to the next, a defining feature of collage, if not the most prominent feature, is its inclusivity. Perhaps by accounting for installation strategies among collage’s arsenal of possibilities, we also usher in the next century of collage development. The artists of Strange Glue (Collage & Installation) exemplify the strange and hybrid nature of Picasso’s and Braque’s invention by marking the longevity, diversity and widespread application of what was once just a simple act of pasting things onto a flat surface.

How many things that surround us blur the distinction between art and life? What isn’t made? Architecture is a collage-based process; it takes hundreds of people to coordinate the construction of a building, accounting for each object used. Similarly, it takes a league of nations and thousands of people to design and assemble the parts required to construct an automobile. Languages are systematic collages of symbols and verbal ideas adjusted by countless people. And cultures, too, are

amalgams of usurped and original traditions.

All of these examples abound with instances where life and art fuse—all collage processes.

Ultimately, the realization that every object in the universe is made up of component parts invokes a connected understanding; as Walt Whitman once declared, “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of stars.” Indeed, organic and inorganic things are held together by the same stuff. Everything is bound to each other by gravity. It is fair to say that if ever we could figure out a way to glue two planets together, we would. Despite the impracticality of that last thought, black holes have been proposed to engage in such cosmic finding and binding practices. Indeed, the covers of collage are too far apart!

The first exhibition raised the question, What is collage? Strange Glue (Collage & Installation) poses, What isn’t collage?

Todd Bartel Gallery Director, Curator The Thompson Gallery ____________________

1. Michael Archer, Installation Art, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994, p. 7 2. Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art, Thames & Hudson, New York, 2004, pp. 13-19 3. Taylor, p. 19 4. Jose Maria Faerna, Great Modern Masters—Duchamp, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996, p. 5 5. Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1995. p. 20 6. Ann Temkin, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, from a short video in which the curator discusses Tu ‘M, http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/34, 12/13/12 7. Dorthea Dietrich, The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, Cambridge University Press 1993, p. 6-7 8. Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada Redefining Art 1958-62, The American Federation of Arts in association with Universe Publishing, New York 1994, p. 18.

9. Sam Hunter, Selections from the Ileana and Michael Sonnabend Collection, exhibition catalogue, The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1985 p. 21 10. Jonathan Fineburg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, 2000, Prentice Hall, p. 183

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Assemblage & Frameless Objects

Aspen Golann ‘05 43.857 N, 71.199 W, 2010 found materials, wood, glass, molding, metal, discarded furniture 46 x 30 inches 28

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Gerri Rachins Red Herring, 2011 artist’s residual drawing fragments with graphite, ink, marker and gouache on paper mounted on panel 16 x 16 x 2 inches 30

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Erin Elizabeth I â?¤ You Sallie Mae, 2011 cutouts from every letter received from Sallie Mae over a three-year period and PVA on canvas 18 inch diameter 32

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John McCaughey The Sleep of Existing Conditions Produces Monsters, 2011 decollaged advertisements with staples 20 x 60 inches 34

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AnchorEd to the Wall

Rose DeSiano Social Fragmentations, 2010 Duraclear, iron, Plexiglas 36 x 25 x 13 inches 38

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Brian Christopher Glaser Men Like to Smile, 2011 print advertisements, staples, floated off wall with t-pins 18 x 78 x 2 inches 40

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Sharon Koelblinger Parallax 1.1, 2011 enamel spray paint and charcoal powder on laser jet print on copy paper 42 x 36 inches 42

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China Marks The Reckoning, 2009 fabric, lace, thread, screen-printing ink, beads, plastic google eye, Jade glue and fusible adhesive 53 x 53 inches 44

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Debra Olin The Alternatives, 2008 dry point and cut monoprints, handmade paper, Arabic and Hebrew newspaper fragments, polymer medium and Velcro on Okawara 60 x 61 inches 46

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Katherine Powers Jumpfly #2 (Tulip), 2010 plastic, foil and tape on acetate 39.5 x 20.25 x 1 inches 48

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Debra Weisberg (Dis) Equilibrium, 2011 paper, ink, tape 71 x 66 x 4 inches 50

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Installation & shifting configuration

Alison Safford Peer, 2012 steel, glass, water, electronics/light, photocopied images on acetate 7 x 5 x 10 inches each 54

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Kendall Schuller Metamorphosis: Being Human Under the Influence of the Animal in Modern Culture, 2009-2012 muslin, cotton cloth, embroidery thread, dog hair, yarn, burlap and various fabrics mounted on wall 84 x 108 inches 56

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JĂĄnis NedĂŠla 200 Penguin Postcards, 2011 collage and mixed media on postcards in glass jars, shelves mounted on wall each jar 9.75 x 1.75 inches 58

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Projected On the Wall & Documentation

Rachael Gorchov If I Lived Here, I’d Be Home, 2011 looped dvd, animation on digital billboard, projected on wall with documentation of site specific billboard installation 6:59 minutes 62

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Wes Kline The Guest, 2011 looped dvd, digital video, projected on wall 2:55 minutes 64

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Multiple Component Wall Installation

Cianne Fragione Ritorno Triptych, 2007 assemblage on wood panels, with metal, oil, paper, various objects 32 x 180 inches 68

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Craig Hill When Thinking Takes Form series, 2010 collage and mixed media on paper each 7 x 9 inches 70

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Paul Matosic Sublime Climate, 2009 arranged Thompson Gallery exhibition flyers (Sublime Climate III: Symbiosis Redefining Nature, 2008) 23.75 inch diameter 72

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Rachel Hibbard 365 Days, Black, Boat, 2006 photocopies, shellac, ink and oil paint, offset on glassine, on book pages 122 x 83 inches 74

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Site Specific installation & Architectural Specificity

Jo Ann Block Hanging Chad, 2010 digital photographs mounted to plywood with chain 47 x 30 inches 78

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Chris Freeman ‘80 Bird’s Nest…on the Quad, 2012 15mm argon/hg luminous tubes, monofilament 30 x 84 x 90 inches Dedicated in loving memory to Pamela and Francis Brooks, Weston, MA 80

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Carmelo Midili Spaziotempo22, 2010 pumice on discarded paintings, canvas panels over wood armature 50 x 65 x 45 inches 82

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Jon McAuliffe Pulling Close, 2011 typewriter ink on paper, charcoal on collaged blocks, typewriter, table, chair and coat 36 x 48 x 36 inches 84

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Intervention

Leslie Vigeant Drawing Unit 1, 2010 ink on various papers, vellum over paper and cardboard, wood, pins, cut into and mounted to wall, with dangling wall cuttings 24 x 32 x 1 inches 88

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Claire Zitzow Armorials I, 2010-12 site specific window installation, Mugar Center for the Performing Arts, inkjet print on 9900 Epson Backlit SBL-7, mounted to interior window panes 74.5 x 115.75 inches 90

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Alex Rheault Voyage, 2012 wall drawing, charcoal, acrylic 102 x 88 inches 92

bottom row: studies for Voyage, ink, gouache, watercolor on paper, 2012

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Strange Glue (Collage & Installation) Exhibition Installation

gallery exterior

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view from gallery entrance

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west wall

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east wall

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north wall with Alex Rheault intervention

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(west facing) partition

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east wall

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(west facing) partition and south wall

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room center, Jon McAuliffe floor installation

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north wall and partition with Leslie Vigeant invervention

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west wall, Jon McAuliffe floor installation

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north wall and (east facing) partition

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(east facing) partition

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north wall, Alison Safford installation

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north wall and northwest corner

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northwest corner, Carmelo Midili installation

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west wall

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south and west walls

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(east facing) partition and south wall

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south wall

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IS (Installation Space) entrance, JĂĄnis NedĂŠla installation

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IS northeast corner, JĂĄnis NedĂŠla installation

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IS southeast corner, JĂĄnis NedĂŠla installation

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IS south wall, JĂĄnis NedĂŠla installation

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red wall, and Claire Zitzow intervention

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red wall

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red wall, Craig Hill installation

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red wall, Rachel Hibbard installation

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red wall, Cianne Fragione installation

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red wall

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Artists’ Bios

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Jo Ann Block, Washington, DC (b. 1946) joannblock.com Rose DeSiano, Brooklyn, NY (b. 1979) www.desiano.com Erin Elizabeth, Bloomington, IL (b. 1984) zhibit.org/elizabetherin Cianne Fragione, Alexandria, VA (b. 1952) ciannefragione.com Chris Freeman ‘80, Winston-Salem, NC (b. 1962) chrisfreemandesigns.com Brian Christopher Glaser, Boston, MA (b. 1985) brianchristopherglaser.com Aspen Golann, Boston, MA (b. 1987) aspengolann.com Rachael Gorchov, New York, NY (b. 1979) rachaelgorchov.com Rachel Hibbard, Portland, OR (b. 1963) web.pdx.edu Craig Hill, Gambier, OH (b. 1974) craighillart.com Wes Kline, Gainesville, FL (b. 1974) weskline.com Sharon Koelblinger, Philadelphia, PA (b. 1982) sharonkoelblinger.com China Marks, Long Island City, NY (b. 1942) chinamarks.net Paul Matosic, Nottingham, United Kingdom (b. 1955) matosic.org.uk Jon McAuliffe, Alstead, NH (b. 1982) mcauliffe-art.com John McCaughey, Providence, RI (b. 1987) johnpaulmccaughey.com Carmelo Midili, Messina, Italy, (b. 1970) carmelomidili.com Jánis Nedéla, North Fremantle, Australia (b. 1955) janisnedela.com.au Debra Olin, Somerville, MA (b. 1950) debraolin.com Katherine Powers, New York, NY (b. undisclosed) kbpowers.com Gerri Rachins, Jamaica Plain, MA (b. 1955) gerrirachins.com Alex Rheault, Washington DC (b. 1962) alexrheault.com Alison Safford, Jamaica Plain, MA (b. 1966) alisonsafford.com Kendall Schuller, Baltimore, MD (b. 1978) kendallblaire.com Leslie Vigeant, Portland, OR (b. 1985) leslievigeant.com Debra Weisberg, Somerville, MA (b. 1953) debraweisberg.com Claire Zitzow, Boulder, CO (b. 1984) www.clairezitzow.com

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COLLagE at 100

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