Collage
Related: assemblage - bricolage - cut and paste - cut up - edit - film edit - montage - photomontage - remix
Artists: Hannah Höch (1889 - 1978)
cover image from Mandarijnen op Zwavelzuur (1963)
image sourced from http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/smul003kuns01/smul003kuns01_001.htm [Feb 2005]
Het Hoedenparadijs (1991) - Willem Frederik Hermans
Definition (art)
Collage is the assemblage of different forms creating a new whole.
For example, an artistic collage work may include newspaper clippings, ribbons, bits of colored or hand-made papers, photographs, etc., glued to a solid support or canvas.
Decoupage is a type of collage usually defined as a craft. It is the process of placing a picture onto an object for decoration. Often decoupage causes the picture to appear to have depth and looks as though it had been painted on the object. The basic process is of glueing (or otherwise affixing) a picture to something to be decorated, then adding further copies of the picture on top, progressively cutting out more and more of the background, giving the illusion of depth in the picture. The picture is often coated with varnish or some other sealant for protection.
(Collage is sometimes distinguished from photomontage, a collage made from photographs or parts of photographs.)
Surrealism has made extensive use of the collage. Cubomania is a collage made by cutting an image into regular squares which are then reassembled automatically or at random. Inimage is a name given by René Passerson to what is usually considered a style of surrealist collage (though it perhaps qualifies instead as a decollage) in which parts are cut away from an existing image to "reveal" another. Collages produced using a similar or perhaps identical method are called etrécissements by Richard Genovese from a method first explored by Marcel Mariën. Genovese also introduced the "excavation" collage (this also includes elements of decollage) which is the layering of printed images, loosely affixed at the corners and then tearing away bits of the upper layer to reveal images from underneath, thereby introducing a new 'collage' of images. Penelope Rosemont invented some methods of surrealist collage, the prehensilhouette and the landscapade.
Collage was often Called the Art form of the 20th century, but this was never fully realised.
Surrealist games such as parallel collage have used collective techniques of collage-making.
The bible of discordianism, the Principia Discordia, is described by its author as a literary collage. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collage [Feb 2005]
Sound collage
Sound collage is the production of songs, musical compositions, or recordings using portions, or samples, of previously made recordings. Like its visual cousin, the collage work may have a completely different effect than that of the component parts, even if the original parts are completely recognizable.
Sound collage first became a possibility with the widespread use of magnetic tape in the early 1960s. Recording engineers soon discovered that tape could be cut with a razorblade and spliced back together in a different order, and even from different sources. It wasn't long before artists began to explore the new possibilities. Iannis Xenakis is the first well-known composer to have worked with sound collage; other early artists who experimented with it include John Cage, Brion Gysin, and William S. Burroughs. The most famous examples in popular music are to be found in the work of The Beatles: George Martin cut up and randomly reassembled a recording of a carousel in "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP, and John Lennon included a long pastiche of sound effects and crowd noises on The Beatles titled "Revolution 9".
The cultural awareness of sound collage was greatly increased in the 1980s and early 1990s due largely to two lawsuits: the first by the Canadian Recording Association against John Oswald for his seminal collage work Plunderphonics and the second by Island Records against the band Negativland for their album U2 (ironically, the latter had nothing to do with sampling and was provoked by Negativland's misleading cover art). The popularity of two new musical genres that included elements of sound collage—rap and house music—over the same period also helped to popularize it. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_collage [Jan 2006]
See also: sound
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