PROSPECTUS

COLLAGE CULTURE: TECHNOLOGIES OF REPRODUCTION AND THE FRAGMENTATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

by

David Banash

Western Illinois University

d-banash@wiu.edu

It is remarkable that all the arts of the twentieth century, high and low, commercial and progressive, are informed by the practice of collage. Unlike other techniques which defined the practice of art in one medium or another at different times, the technique of collage has touched virtually every kind of cultural production. Indeed, its scope and importance as both an applied technique and a coordinating metaphor cannot be overstated. Throughout the last century, collage has been at the center of media as diverse as fine art painting and advertising, sculpture and popular music, photography and hypertext. It is the coordinating metaphor of the modernist novel and a literal technique in postmodern fiction. Both the critical photomontage of the historical avant-garde and advertisements produced by commercial photographers depended on collage to create shocking images. Collage is the technical basis of all cinema, and the preferred technique of the entire genre of found-footage film. Only through the metaphor of collage is it possible to represent the experience of television viewing constantly interrupted by commercials and channel surfing, and it is through collage that both postmodern video artists and the directors of music videos reflect on the experience of a culture saturated in video images. Collage is the basis of the scratching and sampling of hip-hop and the audiotape experiments of musique concrète, and more and more it informs the basic production of even the most innocuous pop song. It returns as a coordinating metaphor in criticism and cultural theory, from the poststructuralist work of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida to cultural criticism pioneered by Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord. The future too, it seems, will be dominated by collage, as emerging digital media develop and reinvent collage techniques for a new century.

Collage Culture: Technologies of Reproduction and the Fragmentation of Everyday Life offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary investigation of collage grounded in the technologies that made possible the extensive use of ready-made materials. It accounts for the rise of collage as the most progressive technique in every major medium of cultural production, defines its connections with mass media, and grounds its ultimate significance in the technologies of reproduction that fueled commodity culture and produced the experiences of shocking fragmentation that have defined modern and postmodern everyday life.

While the ubiquity of collage in the arts and everyday life has been duly noticed, it is surprising how little work has been done that crosses the necessary boundaries to offer a thorough analysis of this technique. While collage is recognized as the most important technique of twentieth-century culture by a substantial number of artists, critics, and theorists, no one has written the kind of comprehensive account I propose. Indeed, while critics have readily pointed out the importance of collage, they have usually done so only in undertheorized generalizations. For instance, literary theorist Gregory Ulmer invokes collage as the most important development of modernist representation, yet he does little to investigate its origins and its concrete economic and technological transformations.

Work by art historians, such as Christine Poggi’s In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage, illuminate brilliantly the practice of collage for the traditions of fine art and avant-garde painting, but make no connections to the impact of collage in other media or its debts to an array of emerging technologies and discourses. Similarly, Dawn Ades’s Photomontage is an excellent history of the rise and importance of collage techniques in photography, but her focus never crosses the bounds of the medium. Postmodern cultural critics such as Simon Frith in Art into Pop or Ulf Poshardt’s DJ Culture explore the importance of ready-made materials and collage techniques to contemporary popular music, but the focus always remains within that medium. William C. Wees’ Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films offers an astonishing catalog and analysis, yet it too stays squarely within narrowly defined mediumistic boundaries. No one has yet synthesized such materials into a comprehensive account of collage itself that moves beyond the boundaries of a single medium or movement. However, as is apparent even in this brief survey, the issues of collage are at the heart of all this work. Bringing together the efforts of scholars on a variety of media, Collage Culture: Technologies of Reproduction and the Fragmentation of Everyday Life demonstrates how the practice of collage came to define the culture of the twentieth century.

Because collage itself is a technique that quite literally cuts up and reassembles the materials of a number of discourses, technologies, and practices, this project is emphatically interdisciplinary synthesis. Rather than exploring the practice of collage from the point of view of one medium at the expense of another, I ground my analysis in what I regard as the condition of possibility for the emergence of collage: the invention of technologies of mass reproduction (steam-driven printing, phonographs, photography, cinema, radios, tape-recorders, xerox machines, digital samplers and scanners, etc.). These technologies created the unprecedented mediascape of consumer capitalism, in which ready-made materials of art, advertising and popular entertainments produced for the first time what theorists call everyday life. Using the work of theorists Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Douglas Kellner, Stuart Hall, Meghan Morris, and John Fiske, I articulate the dialectic of collage as a ceaseless process of resistance and incorporation. While the emergence of an everyday life of consumption defined by ready-made commodities and advertisements is the basis of consumer culture, groups of artists and ordinary people have resisted this ready-made, commodified culture. Taking newspapers, advertisements, albums, postcards, buttons, tickets, dime-store toys, books, and almost any other material that came to hand, they used technologies from scissors and paste to turn-tables and digital samplers to sublate passive consumption into new moments of active production, offering radical critiques and fantastic revisions of the life-world defined by commodities. However, while the cut-and-paste techniques of collage are often the tools of radical critique and utopian imagination, those techniques of fragmentation and reassembly are also deeply imbricated in the technologies of reproduction which make them possible. Thus, what at one moment functions as a radical critique must also be grasped as a deeply ambiguous allegory of the very practices and technologies that have produced everyday life in the first place. With its comprehensive investigation of technologies of mass reproduction, Collage Culture: Technologies of Reproduction and the Fragmentation of Everyday Life offers a unique account of twentieth-century culture.

Chapter One, “The Newspaper: Advertising, Ideology, and the Historical Avant-Garde” traces the rise of advertising images in mass media. Throughout, I argue that commercial mass media pioneered the collage techniques that made possible the avant-garde use of collage as a technique of resistance. Focusing on the emergence of a collage aesthetic in the first years of the century, I establish the emergence of a dialectic of technological innovation and artistic resistance that characterizes the entire history of collage.

The fist technology of the mass media was printing; the rise of advertising posters, billboards, illustrated magazines, and the appearance of daily newspapers with unprecedented space devoted to advertising transformed the visual and verbal culture of the early twentieth century. The daily newspaper in particular was a deeply fraught index of these contradictions. Formally, the newspaper was redefining narrative because of its large format, use of headlines and columns, and its lack of rigid distinctions between fiction, fact, propaganda, and advertising. Any page taken as a whole represented a radically fragmented vision of the world. Fiction and journalism appeared on the same page, while advertisements for the most incongruous products and services appeared next to one another. This leveling of narrative, images and genres prompted strong reactions, some seeing the newspaper as a radically open and progressive form, while others grasped it as a conservative tool of capitalist ideology. Most tellingly, Stéphaen Mallarmé identified it as both in his famous essay, “The Book as a Spiritual Instrument.” However, in what Mallarmé identifies as a debased form, others would find possibilities for utopian hopes or the means of devastating critique in the collage aesthetics that were foundational to the historical avant-garde. Thus F. T. Marinetti could find in the newspaper the very embodiment of Futurist simultaneity, Tzara and other Dadaists the cut-up absurdity that would destroy the very ideologies journalists promulgated, and Surrealists the redemptive collage materials that promised to transfigure the banality of commodity culture into the marvelous.

In the first decades of the century, the developments of journalism and advertising transform the mediascape. Artists respond with collage forms (juxtaposition, fragmentation, simultaneity) that underpin the newspaper and the advertisement, employing them as a means of critique and redemption. Of course, such avant-garde works would subsequently be recuperated by commercial media, and the dialectic of incorporation and resistance continues.

Chapter Two, “Camera Eyes: The Spectacle of Collage,” investigates the role of film in the rise and development of collage as practice, metaphor, and aesthetic. Like the newspaper, the technologies of film produced and depended upon collage practices and forms: ready-made images, cutting, pasting, juxtaposition, and even simultaneity. Indeed, the importance of montage theory to the development of film, especially in the work of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, make clear the importance of collage techniques to the development of film as a mass medium. However, like the newspaper, film was grasped by some as a force of ideological coercion and aesthetic debasement while others saw in it the possibility for a new critical consciousness. For Walter Benjamin, in particular, the cut-and-paste techniques of film promised the emergence of a critical consciousness, while Theodor Adorno feared a seamless culture industry of sameness. Such radically different perceptions reveal again the dialectic of collage. The expense of producing films, the technical skills required, and the difficulty of distribution guaranteed that, by and large, the production of it as a mass medium would stay in the hands of large studios with conservative agendas. However, the collage basis of film nonetheless provided critical opportunities. To trace this impact, I will consider both European and American films from the first half of the twentieth century, including films by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Joeseph Cornell, D. W. Griffith, Louis Buñuel and others. Beyond a formal analysis of montage and its relationship to collage, ideology and resistance, I will explore the ways in which collage techniques and the use of readymade material informed even seemingly more synthetic films of the later 1930s and 1940s, including mainstream studio films of directors such as Billy Wilder and Frank Capra.

Just as important as the practice of collage in specific films is the use of collage techniques as a metaphor for the larger culture. The cinematic techniques of the form could be turned to the purposes of critique for another medium entirely. A particularly powerful example of such a technique is found in John Dos Passos’s “Newsreal” sections of The U.S.A. Trilogy. These are tremendously complex collage texts, based almost exclusively on ready-made materials Dos Passos took from newspaper headlines and stories he found in the Chicago newspaper “morgues.” Formally, Dos Passos also brings together the two mediums which were most important to collage in the first half of the century, film and the newspaper. He makes clear how these organs usually operate in the service of repression and ideology, but through his ingenious and often absurd Dada-inspired cut-ups, which use the radical juxtaposition of collage to create critical moments, Dos Passos uses the collage techniques of these media in the service of resistance. In this, he shares much with Walter Benjamin, who hoped both cinema, or his own Arcades project, might spur just such new techniques and insights.

Finally, turning to the postwar world, this chapter will survey the growing field of found-footage film in the work of Craig Baldwin, Guy Debord, Woody Allen, Abigail Child, Ed Wood, Bruce Conner, and others. These filmmakers found themselves in a profoundly different cultural context, with the materials and technology to make found-footage films everywhere available and affordable. Indeed, in a century defined by cinema, these artists were able to take discarded prints, outdated industrial and training films, and other materials which were the detritus of the culture industry and offer a startling reply to the spectacle. At times working procedurally, sometimes for absurdist effects, and often with clearly critical agendas, these filmmakers engage in a Benjaminian redemption of these readymade materials, transfiguring them for critical ends.

Chapter Three, “Postmodern Sounds: Tape-recorders and Turntables,” examines the audio technologies of collage. Modernist collage in painting, literature, film and other media is primarily produced and received in terms of visual practices and metaphors because the media that subtend these collage practices are visual media. Thus even literary collages, such as Dos Passos’s “Newsreels” or Surrealist “newspaper” poems are presented as the manipulation of fragments on the visual plane of the page. For postwar artists, the technologies of magnetic audiotape and the newly improved technology of vinyl LP albums provide the first opportunities to produce true audio collages based on ready-made materials. Indeed, they make it possible for almost anyone to literally “sample” and manipulate material that previously was only available through the capital-intensive technologies of the culture industry itself.

Strikingly, the two groups of artists who pioneer audio collage are almost diametrically opposed but share a profoundly critical response to mainstream culture. On the one hand, the technology of audiotape was embraced and pioneered by middle-class, white European and American artists, deeply aware of avant-garde and fine art traditions of visual art, music, and poetry. On the other hand, the use of turntables to take readymade music and create new and critical forms was pioneered almost exclusively by African-Americans in the poverty-ridden neighborhoods of the Bronx. These hip-hop artists worked out audio collage in relationship to the Caribbean traditions of dub-music and sound systems, as well as African aesthetics of call-and-response that coordinate African-American music and poetry. Like the visual technologies of modernist collage, these audio technologies were first pioneered in the service of the culture industry, and initially used for the distribution and reproduction of the culture industry’s products. However, both the white “tape-artists” and black DJs responded to this culture, offering critical answers and alternatives by manipulating the technologies and readymade materials of the culture industry.

Central to the development of audio-collage through audio tape is Henri Chopin. His publication of the audio-visual magazines Cinquième Saison and OU between 1958 and 1974 provides a window on the critical techniques and agendas that changed the dominant metaphor of collage from the visual to the aural. Other international writers and artists such as members of Lettrisme and Fluxus, Jiri Kolar, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Tom Phillips, continued to develop critical approaches to the use and manipulation of audiotape. However, the most radically critical techniques were certainly those of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, who in The Electronic Revolution and The Third Mind adopted an analysis of mass media coextensive with Guy Debords The Society of the Spectacle. However, unlike Debord, Gysin and Burroughs thought the greatest hope for replying to the spectacle lay not with film, but in the portable audiotape recorder. Indeed, throughout the sixties and seventies the audiotape became one of Burroughs’s favored metaphors for understanding the ideological process of interpellation through the mass-media, and through their audio experiments Burroughs and Gysin hoped to disrupt the control functions of the mass media.

The development of scratching and sampling during the 1970s by DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa turned the culture industry on its head, and would ultimately lead to a wholesale transformation of that industry that is only now being limited and controlled through the institution of draconian copyright protections that put the power back in the hands of corporations. However, from the early 1970s through the late 1980s, these DJs and others, from Grand Wizard Theodore to the Jam Master J transformed the passive consumption of mass produced music into the radical and often critical use of readymade materials to articulate a new aesthetic. Deeply connected with the struggle for civil rights, the use of scratching and sampling would become most important in the work of Chuck D. and Public Enemy, where they used a devastating combination of media sound-bites and a dizzying array of music to articulate a critique of mass media while providing an alternative, collage model of aesthetic production. Indeed, the dream of Gysin and Burroughs to fully reply to the spectacle through its own productions was only realized on a large scale by these DJs. Their success changed the production of music, the aesthetic of pop, and, ultimately, the very structure and laws of the culture industry.

Chapter Four, “From Xerox to Punk: DIY Culture,” focuses on the relationship of Punk subcultures to the technology of photocopiers. Though not nearly so influential as the technologies of newspapers or turntables, the photocopier merits special attention because it presents one of the most powerful examples of a collage aesthetic that offers avenues of resistance to the culture industry through its own technologies and materials.

Photostatic reproduction was invented for and exclusively devoted to the reproduction of corporate culture and government bureaucracy. Like early computers, photostatic technology remained for many years a bulky and capital-intensive technology. It was firmly a technology not of art but of commerce and control. However, as the technology of photocopiers slowly became more affordable, private citizens began to find new uses for it. Xerox machines were used to print small publications known as “zines.” Though zines printed in other forms have a long history in the fan cultures associated with science-fiction, the punk subculture of the late 1970s seized on photostatic technologies to assemble critical and alternative publications. What is most striking in these often anonymous productions is the use of collage techniques applied to ready-made commercial images, such as advertisements and newspaper clippings. In this, punk zines have direct connections to Dada and the critical project of the historical avant-garde. However, unlike such art movements, Punk subcultures and zine productions lie emphatically outside the structures and discourses of art history. Over the past twenty-five years, zine culture has grown beyond its roots in both genre-fiction and punk subcultures to constitute a subculture of its own, with literally thousands of authors publishing zines in dozens of genres today. These productions reflect an organic response to mass culture that arises from the working class and middle class. Building on work such as Stephen Duncombe’s Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, along with the growing catalogs and anthologies of zine culture from Fact Sheet 5 to Photostatic and Xeroxial Editions, I will survey the use of photostatic technologies to sample and respond to the contemporary media culture.

Chapter five, “Digital Worlds: The Rise of Virtual Collage,” explores the ways in which the emerging digital technologies are transforming a culture largely defined in terms of collage. Looking carefully at hypertext literature, the digital production of popular music, and the manipulation of images in film, television, and videogames, I argue that these developing technologies challenge our understanding of collage. In the previous chapters, I have built a definition of collage that emphasizes the use of ready-made materials, such as advertising images, the text of newspapers, or found-footage in films. Subtending all these techniques of collage is the image of scissors and paste. Indeed, the scissors-and-paste metaphor for collage is so important for our contemporary understanding of the construction and use of ready-made materials that they appear as icons in almost every computer program. While many hypertexts, popular songs, and other digital works do operate through just this literal cutting-and-pasting, the very notion of ready-made materials is changing with virtual technologies. For instance, while the recent film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow uses readymade images collaged into its shots, it also employs virtual materials created by computers. What is the status of such virtual materials, how do such materials and practices transform the meaning of collage? In this final chapter, I suggest that collage practices, and their influence as metaphors, is deeply rooted in the technologies, anxieties, and media culture of the twentieth century. I will end with a detailed analysis of how those metaphors served to coordinate both agendas of ideological control and oppositional projects of resistance in the twentieth century. I will contrast these with the emerging metaphors of virtual creation and transformation, in which collage techniques are applied to material that is neither mass-produced nor readymade, but instead generated through the virtual manipulation of abstract code. The book concludes with an exploration of what we may gain and what we may lose as we depend less exclusively on the mass-produced readymade, and more on the virtual, to understand the art and media of the future.