Collage shortcuts

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In his book Auge und Wort (“The Eye and the Word”) Werner Spies opposes the pretentious & massive nazi-art made for eternity by the pompous sculptor Arno Breker to the fragility of collage. Assembling heterogeneous elements of tawdry stuff is in his eyes a fight against the norm, against the “purity” of art, of human races etc. and against the mania of being always right.
I cannot agree more. The fragility of a collage is one of its main virtues. Collages won’t last, art speculators shun them and even propagandists keep their hands off. Collages capture the instant, not eternity. By mixing things up, they fail to illustrate slogans. As for the purity, when I hear this word, I associate it with sterilization and void - or with “pure pork” in a sausage where it may be appropriate and enjoyable. But art – not unlike a sausage - is never made out of completely "pure" ingredients, all its parts carry the traces of countless modifications acquired throughout the history of pictorial representation. Indeed, just as in biological evolution, every new product is a mix of second-hand ingredients. And a collage, to my mind, is diversity displayed, without the ideological domination of a central point of view. I wouldn’t pretend fighting totalitarianism but I pretend doing works of art that cannot be read in an ideological way, in one unique way of thinking (Manichaeism). The trick I employ is to make the beholder hesitate between several possibilities, for example between the interpretation of a form as being the subject or the background.

Or, with respect to the content, a thing may be either this or that, or it may be both this and that, like being old and young at the same time.

Speaking of Warhol, Spies sees in his work an analogy with cloning, everything being essentially the same and … pure. One can wonder why this art appeals so much to everybody. Collage is always uncertain, it reproduces but it messes everything up. That’s why it puzzles the beholder. My problem is that I am bewildered with Breker, Warhol etc. and not with Goya, Dix and dada… Am I normal?