Collage Montage Assemblage

Montage, today, is a widespread procedure that doesn’t concern just artistic production, but also our daily lives and the use everyone makes of that huge visual archive that contemporary media place at our disposal. In a technologically advanced society, where the notion of postproduction regulates our relationship with images and objects, it is therefore necessary to thoroughly investigate the role, possibilities, and, most of all, anthropological and political connotations of montage; and to ask ourselves whether – in comparison to the heroic years of the avant-garde movements – montage has become a faded and standardized practice or if it is a more and more effective means to understand and reprogramme the world, especially in relation to the technical possibilities offered by new media and remix practices.

Dès les années 1910, aucun art n'est épargné par la tentation collagiste. Les avant-gardes explorent aventureusement, sans modèles normatifs, les perspectives radicalement nouvelles ouvertes par l'art du collage, du montage et de l'assemblage de matériaux-fragments hétérogènes. Par l'analyse de nombreuses oeuvres, l'auteur montre que le processus de déconstruction et de reconstruction mis en mouvement construit une efficace esthétique du choc. Le recours a ce qui est plus qu'un simple procédé permet de mettre en scène les contradictions, visibles ou dissimulées, qui hantent des réalités tourmentées, faisant apparaître en tension les inquiétudes et les espérances qui agitent des moments historiques incertains. Pour l'auteur, ces productions possèdent une authentique puissance poétique et politique et offrent aux regardeurs, spectateurs, lecteurs, auditeurs... une salvatrice expérience émancipée.

Entre 1910 et 1980, en résonance étroite avec les utopies esthétiques et politiques de la modernité, de nombreux artistes et écrivains proposent, sans modèles normatifs, des oeuvres conçues en collant, montant et assemblant des matériaux-fragments hétérogènes. L'auteur montre que le processus de déconstruction et de reconstruction mis en mouvement au sein de ces productions concrétise une efficace esthétique du choc, proposant des images-situations en décalage et des projections aléatoires qui nous précipitent aux confins d'autres mondes à habiter. L'art du collage est pensé comme un parti pris faisant surgir ici et maintenant le merveilleux et la perturbation, contestant ainsi l'ordre établi. Ces productions hérétiques évoquent de salutaires et intempestives reconfigurations possibles-impossibles à explorer. Pour l'auteur, ces oeuvres-constellations polyphoniques relèvent d'une esthétique de la non- cohérence, qui a à voir avec l'utopie concrète, donc avec la perspective de l'émancipation (individuelle et collective).

Collage of Myself presents a groundbreaking account of the creative story behind America's most celebrated collection of poems. In the first book length study of Walt Whitman's journals and manuscripts, Matt Miller demonstrates that until approximately 1854 (only a single year before the first publication of Leaves of Grass), Whitman---who once speculated that Leaves would be a novel or a play---was unaware that his ambitions would assume the form of poetry at all. Collage of Myself details Whitman's discovery of a remarkable new creative process that allowed him to transform a diverse array of texts into poems such as "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers." Whitman embraced an art of fragments that encouraged him to "cut and paste" his lines into ever evolving forms based on what he called "spinal ideas." This approach to language, Miller argues, represents the first major use in the Western arts of the technique later know as collage, an observation with significant ramifications for our reception of subsequent artists and writers. Long before the modernists, Whitman integrated found text and ready made language into a revolutionary formulation of artistic production that anticipates much of what is exciting about modern and postmodern art. Using the Walt Whitman Archive's collection of digital images to study what were previously scattered and inaccessible manuscript pages, Miller provides a breakthrough in our understanding of the great American literary icon.

In all the arts a war is being waged between modernists and postmodernists. Radicals have tended to side with the modernists against the forces of conservatism. Postmodern Culture is a break with this tendency. Its contributors propose a postmodernism of resistance - an aesthetic that rejects hierarchy and celebrates diversity. Ranging from architecture, sculpture and painting to music, photography and film, this collection is now recognised as a seminal text on the postmodernism debate.The essays are by Hal Foster, Jürgen Habermas, Kenneth Frampton, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Gregory L. Ulmer, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Edward W. Said.