Robyn Thomas

The following is an adaptation of notes and a slide presentation. Text in BOLD justified at the right of the page were questions presented to the workshop participants for discussion.

Intro self- location, education, vocation.

What I know of this workshop from the syllabus and speaking with Margaret and Jon; this is a mixed lab/lecture exploring the history of collage and related methods, practical experiments in collage journals, a mid-term portfolio of 2D collage [cut and paste approach] and a final portfolio focusing on the addition of 3D elements/Assemblage/Digital Montage.

I’ll begin with a lecture format...but I’m not going to do all the talking...we’re a small group, and this is a mid-level workshop so I’m going to ask you to add to the discussion, but I reserve the right to steer us back on topic if we begin to stray.

This is a visiting artist talk so I’ve brought some of my current work with me to show a way I am currently using collage as a method in my practice and, as you read in the first reading assignment A SHORT HISTORY OF COLLAGE: Highlighting a Few Pivotal Artists by Martha Rucker, ‘to enhance the texture of their offerings, to emphasize points of reference and to create pleasure.’

This will take us to about 1:30 PM when we’ll take a 20 minute break. Then we’ll come back, if you have any questions for me about my work or the artists whose work I presented we can discuss it then; I’ll ask some of you to share your collage journals with us perhaps talk about how what we’ve discussed today might be relevant to your work, and with any time remaining we’ll watch a video from Dara Birnbaum.

First, what would you like to tell me about the following: Collage? Appropriation?

Who are some artists you’ve looked at so far?

Let’s say I have never seen this work before, what would you tell me about it?

Next I’ll run through some work by other artists, contemporaries of Frau Höch up to now to provide a bit of context for how I understand and apply collage as a method in my work.

What is a Readymade?

L.H.O.O.Q. [Mona Lisa with Moustache] is considered an ‘assisted readymade’; a souvenir postcard Duchamp altered by drawing on in ink and pencil. We’ve seen many people ‘appropriate’ Duchamp’s little joke with Da Vinci's La Gioconda, just do a Google image search and you will find he was by no means ‘original’....see this example from 1883.

Back to L.H.O.O.Q. [1919] and Rrose Sélavy [photo by Man Ray, 1920-21]. I’m showing the Mona Lisa with Moustache together with the photo of Duchamp’s alter ego, Rrose Sélavy for two reasons. The second reason is I want you to keep Rrose in the back of your mind for later in the presentation when I discuss my own work; the first reason is to connect Duchamp to his colleague Man Ray who took the photos of Rrose.

Can anyone tell me anything about Man Ray?

What might you be able to tell me about this technique?

Are you familiar with the artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy?

Collage, rayograph or photomontage, what is the difference?

Moving on to a contemporary of Höch, Duchamp, Ray and Moholy-Nagy.

Are you familiar with the artist El Lissitzky?

[Russian/Soviet  avant-garde/ suprematist/constructivist artist, designer, photographer, typographer, architect El Lissitzky b. 1890 d. 1941.] El Lissitzky was a key figure in the early 20th century art movements of Suprematism or Russian/Soviet Constructivism. The title of this self portrait is The Constructor.

He was connected to artist of the Bauhaus and DeStijl as cultural ambassador to Weimar Germany as well as through his education in architecture in Germany before WWI. His training as an artist and designer was grounded in the traditions of the Jewish arts community as a student, illustrator of Yiddish children's books, and eventually teaching at the invitation of his friend, the painter Marc Chagall. Eventually he split philosophically from Chagall, instead going in the direction of suprematism [Kazimir Malevich]; although traces of his earlier training and motifs can be found throughout this conceptual and graphic shift, such as what is considered the “Hand of God” in The Constructor [Self Portrait].

Here is an example of his work as a graphic designer from the same period with a distinct collage-aesthetic.

Proun, pronounced pro-oon; the word is a contraction of a Russian phrase meaning: design for the confirmation of the new, and is a series of paintings in which Lissitzky worked out his own approach to suprematism/constructivism. Lissitzky eventually referred to the work as “the station where one changes from painting to architecture”.[Lissitzky-Kuppers, Sophie (1980). El Lissitzky, life, letters, texts. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-23090-0.]

This image is not yet a painting...it is according to its material-method description a ‘collage’ of painted papers. This next Proun is labeled as a ‘painting’.

Consider how collage as a conceptual-method has been applied across all four images I’ve shown; I’ll briefly go back to each slide.

How has collage informed the material of Lissitzky’s work?

What differences do you see?

Skipping ahead and across the ocean to the Post-war American art scene of the late 1950s-1960s. The next image is from the artist Robert Rauschenberg [b. 1925 d. 2008]

What can you tell me about Robert Rauschenberg?

I’m showing Tracer as an example of where the conceptual and material method of collage begin to meld in the artist’s work.  Prior Rauschenberg worked in both media; created his combines; but this work is important in his catalogue for his using the silkscreen process together with paint on the canvas.

What are your thoughts about how the artist used collage when you look at this work?

Moving on I will next focus on a series of work from a contemporary of Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns [b. 1930-]. The works I’m showing are what would probably now be considered late-mid-career work from Johns, and I am showing them because I would like you to consider how he uses a type of personal archive as the source for collage images to reflect on his life-interests and work.

What can you tell me about Jasper Johns?

Seasons is an allegory...the four seasons=four ages of man; and the paintings serve as a self portrait, a collage of his identity. The work is a very classic and contemporary painting embedded in the method of collage.

Does anyone want to tell me what he or she sees in the painting?

Think about what you might include in a self portrait collage.

Like Rauschenberg, Johns has frequently used printmaking in his practice, however in a much more ‘traditional’ approach than Rauschenberg. Johns reproduces his paintings and drawings/studies as intaglio prints [editions of < 100]. There is a large[or larger] market for these. Note: this painting is in the artist’s own collection; Fall he has loaned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. You’re more likely to see the prints than the paintings of Seasons.

Is there anything you’d like to say about how Johns used collage across this work?

What do you think about how he has put the reproductions of Season into the world while holding onto the paintings?

The final artist’s work I’d like to share with you is from the painter Andrew Cooks [b. 1956-]. I’ll show images directly from the artist’s website: http://www.andrew-cooks.com

In the essay Time Never Stays In A Place- Time Takes Hold Ecke Pfümpe writes of how Cooks in his ongoing exploration of the space and idea of the garden under the collective title Imagining the Garden uses the Baroque garden as a metaphor for how we experience space through movement and time.

Listen how Pfümpe defines the garden per Cooks:

Gardens are a cross cultural idea and they serve utilitarian and aesthetic purposes. By definition a garden is nature annexed to an idea;... Gardens are investigations of depth & they invite motion. We are urged to move through the garden… As we do this, a garden is in an ongoing state of becoming as our experience of it unfolds over time. We pass this way and that, drawn to focal points, to scents and textures, to views and Effects. The experience of being in a garden is sensory- gardens, all gardens, play to our senses...

Keep this definition of the garden in your head while we look at the following definition of collage.

Paying closer attention to the third meaning shown: an assemblage or occurrence of diverse elements or fragments in unlikely or unexpected juxtaposition.

How might this definition of collage align with Pfümpe’s definition of the garden?

Taking a look at Cooks’ painting and in the Ponds broken off from the sky IV 2009, oil, metallic pigment & pencil on paper, 60" x 134”.

How might you see both definitions manifest themselves in this painting?

This is what Pfümpe tells us of process, the structure and the sources Cooks’ applies in the paintings:

Taking a dynamic, Baroque approach to pictorial space Cooks explores the gardens’ invitation to movement by layering and weaving complex fictional spaces. He uses designs from formal French and Persian gardens, together with pattern and decoration to create and deny this space.

Cooks employs a wide variety of marking systems to enhance these illusions of space, tromp l’oeil, and flatness. Using distortions of pattern he hints, too, at our space as images push out toward us. Figures at leisure are added to heighten our being in this ‘imagined garden’ and finally, text from poetry, prose and place names asks us to read, prompting our desire to further meaning.

Is this collage?

Looking at another painting from the same group, and in the Ponds broken off from the sky VI 2009, oil, metallic pigment & pencil on paper, 60" x 62”.

Tell me what you are seeing?

What are you recognizing in this painting in relation to the previous painting?

Let’s take a look at what Cooks on his website labels Miniatures, smaller works that explore the fragments contained within the larger paintings

We’ll specifically look at:

Some Blossoms, 2008

Some Trees, 2007

Tosseurs and Tossettes, 2007

Untitled (polyptych), 2007

The Soubise Paintings, 2002-2005

What are you recognizing here in relation to the larger paintings?

How or where might the artist find the images he is working with?

Here are installation photos of here and there, 2014. What you are seeing are larger paintings hung along a line of smaller rectangles wrapping around the corner of a gallery, and with a larger rectangle, an iPad, also embedded in the line. Using the technology of the instant photo, and later digital photos, Cooks captures by the glance images caught from the corner of his eye while moving through space.

Now I’ll show a segment [beginning at 2:20 for about 1 minute] from Andrew Cooks presentation Comprehensive Glance, Berlin, July 2015 to give you a clearer idea of these captured glances as well as other sources for the fragments the artist imagines to occupy his gardens.

We have seen examples of artists using collage in their practice in a variety of material and conceptual ways. This is how I use collage, too; never in one single way, never purely a material or a conceptual method, but a mixture of both. At times I use collage consciously and at other times less consciously as a means to develop imagery, composition, experiment with color, form and pattern, and, like Martha Rucker writes as a means to emphasize points of reference and to create pleasure.’

I source my materials from magazines, books, newspapers, and pamphlets; my kids’ drawings, paintings, prints and drawings of my own that are going nowhere; the internet, fabric samples, old wrapping paper, wallpaper, photos I’ve taken…All the materials I use are relevant to the point I am trying to emphasize in the work, and I choose them for their aesthetic value and function in the work. I generally don’t go looking for specific material; I let it find me, and then respond to it.

I’ve used the materials in sketchbooks and have incorporated them in a cut and paste method directly into or onto the work. Additionally I’ve used the materials as jumping off points for works that do not involve ‘cut and paste’, but rather are spun off of that method. Sometimes the works that result from the collage method become fragments in a greater collage that is their installation [in a location, as a multi-panel painting- greater than a diptych or triptych].

In other words, I take both a micro- and a macroscopic approach to collage. Microscopically as a ‘cut and paste’ method and macroscopically as a conceptual method. This is something I encourage all of you to consider when working with collage. We can discuss some ways of doing this in the second half of the workshop today.

Let’s take a look at some of my current work I’ve brought with me today.

I mentioned in my introduction I’ve recently finished my MFA Creative Practice and am beginning my studies towards a PhD Creative Practice. The focus of my work is on identity in the relationship to the artist, object and spectator, the materiality of the object and the liminal space in which these all meet up and mingle. I am a painter, I also write and I am not averse to exploring and bringing elements of other, non-painterly methods into my work. In that way my practice itself becomes a form of collage. But it is the making-painting I begin with and the making-painting is where I ultimately end up again.

The past half year has been a time of transition from one major project to the next. In April I looked at my practice, what I was proposing to do over the next 3-4 years, and then identified ‘weak spots’ that I wanted to spend the next 6 to 12 months working on strengthening in order to move forward with my PhD project. This I consider ‘background research’.

A large part of my PhD project focuses on the development of artistic alter egos, like Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy, pseudonyms and heteronyms [define]. All these are created identities, characters whose physical and mental attributes are collaged together from various materials sourced by the artist.

What I found to be a weakness when I looked at my practice was that I haven’t spent much time developing or studying other characters and the narratives which form identities. I work primarily with abstraction. I have in the past created abstract paintings that were heavy on narrative, though generally the narrative was not overtly related to character. My recent work has been on self-portraiture; I spent the past two years looking at only who I was, and not who others are, other than through the personal lens of how my identity might be formed by the perception of others.

I began developing an alter ego through writing last year; as of this past spring she had not yet physically manifested herself to me. Part of my project involves collaborating with these alter egos, as well as their eventually working independent of me as creators of their own work. I decided this would be a good time to begin collaborating with Melusine Van der Weyden in an exercise to develop characters and narratives. This exercise would help me to not only begin thinking of ‘character’ but also to think how Melusine might think about and approach characters, and how she might ‘create’.

I decided to create a sketchbook of character collages, using parts of figures from fashion magazines, scraps of papers, drawings and paintings, and photos from recent projects.

I presented the Sketchbook physically and it was available to look at during the break.

These collages and the characters that inhabit them were not created without a narrative- context. The story goes, Melusine had recently disappeared for a few weeks while I finished writing my thesis; she headed to Naples, FL to stay at a friends’ condo, sun herself by the pool and do all those lazy, vacation things. She came back to New England and told me stories of the people she met. These stories served as the basis for the collages in the sketchbook.

My goal was to create about one collage a day for about a month.

While working on my MFA project I began to play around with scanning and photographing fragments of the paintings, then printing these onto Arches Grain Satiné watercolor paper, over-painting those prints, re-photographing or re-scanning, printing again...creating a never-ending process analogous to the way we build identity through filtering, layering and subtracting. This is the path that I then decided to follow with the Character Collages.

I presented the Prints physically and they were available to look at during the break.

I agreed to show the work as a collaboration, with Melusine providing additional text, in an experimental art space a colleague was organizing in Berlin this summer. But then Melusine took off again for parts unknown.

I continued to work on the collages alone in my studio throughout June and early July. I flew to Berlin with a selection of prints and not knowing anything about the space, what I’d be doing with the work once I got there, or if Melusine would show up with some text. I arrived at Frankfurt Flughafen and while waiting at the gate for my connecting flight to Berlin I picked up a free copy of the current issue of the popular news and culture magazine Stern.

After arriving in Berlin first thing I did was buy a pair of scissors and a pack of glue sticks.

Then I went to sleep.

The next morning I woke up to find Melusine cutting out words from Stern and laying them out on the prints. Melusine is German and bilingual, so she writes in German and in English. She was building abstract texts in German on the original stories she had told me about each character in English. It was then my job to glue everything down, adjusting placement as needed.

When we completed adding the collage-text Melusine disappeared again. This time to Vienna in search of the writer Ecke Pfümpe, a somewhat reclusive type, whom she had heard, was rumored to be settled there, and I went off to install the work.

I did not have the work framed, had never seen the space, and had a very limited budget. I decided I would find the least expensive way to hand the work without tape or too many nails or pins [European plaster walls are not conducive to either].

I picked up some curtain clips and ribbon used for tying up gifts.

I presented a fragment of the hanging system and made it available to look at during break.

When I got to the space and looked around on the wall opposite the store-front window was this big grey, abstract oil painting, possibly a seascape, that was a permanent part of the space. The person curating the space had tried to take it down, but it was too heavy and there was really no place to safely store it. I asked if I could incorporate it into my piece; this is what I did.

Installation of Character Collages International Experimental Art Space: Berlin-Wedding July-August 2016

The collages became fragments of a larger collage through their installation.

Melusine and I eventually returned to Rhode Island; she cut out more words and laid out collages for me to glue so every collage had its text version. Then she disappeared again...this time to London, still searching for Mr. Pfümpe. She said she’ll be back by end of this week. I went back to scanning, printing and painting the collages. And have begun the next collages in the sketchbook from these fragments.

A question for you on my approach to and use of collage as a method:

Where might you think the transition between appropriation and originality occurs in my work? Why?

Collage is an integral part of my practice because of the following:

1. It offers me the opportunity to play with the materials and ideas. Through play I am able to remain open to what the material has to say relevant to what I am exploring conceptually. I enjoy playing with materials, and it helps to drive my conceptual exploration, or play, with the ideas I am expressing in with the work.
2. Thinking about the method of collage through making helps me to consider the relevance of collage in a much broader sense to all areas of our lives; particularly my areas of research: identity, liminality and materiality.
3. Because I consider a work never ‘finished’ but merely a step on the path leading to another work combining collage with techniques of digital documentation and reproduction gives me the freedom to explore within a work multiple pathways.

The great thing about collage is we often are using materials that are cheap, available in volume; they aren’t ‘precious’ so play with collage!