RECYCLED IMAGES: WEEK THREE: COLLAGE: Papier collé & Cut-ups

We begin at the beginning of our synthetic 20th century, with the word "collage" from the French word for GLUE, coined and developed as a technique of visual art by

Picasso "Still LIfe with Chair Caning"

Braque "Violin and Pipe-Le Quotidien" !

We watched the exciting and comprehensive Germany-DADA, An ABC of Dadaism, a 1969 documentary by Helmut Herbst, an inventive work of collage itself, that gives us a portrait of the extremely active DADA period for (anti-) artists, writers, letters, ideas, materials, collaborations, theatrical hijinks and politics. The framing device of the film is a backwards alphabet of participants, as well as a Sothebys auction of the library of Dada founder Tristan "poetry is for everyone" Tzara , and a features the radical Dada artists Raoul photomontage Hausman& Hannah Cut with a Kitchen Knife Hoch .

Jump ahead 50 years --shift cut & tangle wordlines with Brion Gysin's invention of CUT UPS, developed in collaboration with author William Burroughs, who was inspired by Tristan Tzara and utilized this radical technique in many of his novels such as his 1962 The Ticket that Exploded .

For our first in class workshop we explored these techniques of Tzara, Gysin and Burroughs, perpetrated upon the New York Times (the paper of record) .

"When you cut into the present the future leaks out." said Burroughs, suggesting that to engage in cut-ups might be a way to decode the written material's implicit content, to discover a truer meaning of any given text, or perhaps even as a form of divination.

We made our own experiments and with constraints, recombinant meaning, anti-authorship, and though the results were uneven they were definitely unpredictable, somewhat destabilizing, and quite surprising.

I'll post our class poem pulled form some of the differnet groups cut-ups at teh end of our workshop pictures.

Next week: APPROPRIATION!! Read up on all those texts from our Appropriation textbook and I look forward to your first assignments in 2D collages next week.