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For me, there are two kinds of collages: illustration and construction.
Illustration is the most widespread kind. Techniques:
You simply insert some alien element in a picture - for ex. you take a diver and put him into a normal landscape;
you make changements in scale, like a giant insect etc.;
you put things upside down.
Generally, in this kind of picture, you have a relatively coherent space (cf. surrealistic pictures).
Construction has to do with edges and rimes. It's about assembling forms and thus create new associations, like in composed words. I usually speak of grafts. Techniques:
you assemble different items while paying attention to their borders;
you work with "rimes", repetition of forms from different objects.
With this kind of collage, you necessarily distort the pictorial space. For the onlooker, it means that he has to decide which form he will privilege, because the relationship between subject and background ist disturbed.
What's the interest in disturbing the poor onlooker, already disturbed by contemporary art?
Because of the conventional aspect of illustration, which - at least in my eyes - comforts the onlooker in his way of seeing. Whereas for me collage wants to change the ways of seeing, as all great art has always done. Not for mere provocation, but in order to open new mental spaces. The danger in doing it is to confuse the onlooker too much, like in conceptual art for ex. Here is the strength of magazine collage: the material is already familiar, it's the cut&and assemblage which makes is alien.
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