intermedia
on collage
"Collage may be seen as a quintessential twentieth-century art form with multiple layers and signposts pointing to a variety of forms and realities, and to the possibility or suggestion of countless new realities."

"The concepts of disintegration, fragmentation, and integration are perhaps particularly important for the medium of collage."

"The French word collage, from the verb coller, means 'pasting, sticking, or gluing' onto a surface...in slang the word collage means an illicit love affair...the past participle collé referes to something fake or pretend in slang."

"The term assemblage refers to the fitting together of parts and pieces and has been applied to both two and three dimensional forms."

"Décollage refers to 'ungluing', or taking off or destroying or dissolving an image."

"The German verb montieren (is one source for) the term montage, which means 'to assemble'."

"Bricolage means 'the putting together of odds and ends'."

"Collages point to the paradox between 'the true and the false'."

"The principle of collage construction collapses the distinction between high and low by transforming the totalizing creative practice of traditional painting into a fragmented consumption of already existing manufactured images."

pablo picasso, still life with chair caning, 1912

pablo picasso, guitar, 1913

hans (jean) arp, chance collage, 1916

hans (jean) arp, trousse, 1920

kurt schwitters, customs, 1937

kurt schwitters, proposal, 1942

raoul hausmann, collage, c. 1920
(inventor of "optophonetic poetry")

19 francis picabia, l'oeil, 1921
"joseph cornell (1903-1973) spent most of his life in a frame house on utopia parkway in queens, new york, with his mother and his crippled brother...from there this reclusive, gray, long-beaked man would sally forth on small voyages of discovery, scavenging for relics of the past in new york junk shops and flea markets...in the studio he would sort his finds into their eccentric categories and file them with boxes of his own momentos." robert hughes, american visions

cornell had no formal artistic training and created poetry from the commonplace...he was fascinated by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects, relying on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition and on the evocation of nostalgia. he created paintings and made films, one of which, rose hobart, was made entirely from splicing together film stock found in new jersey warehouses.

joseph cornell, egypt, c. 1930

joseph cornell, box, c. 1930

joseph cornell, navigation, c. 1930

joseph cornell, slider, c. 1930

joseph cornell, constellations, c. 1930

joseph cornell, medici boy, c. 1930