Stop! Drop! Collage!

Holly! It’s Margaret :-)

sorry for the delay!

HELLO

prime evidence of why i should not own a phone

i am so sorry for the delay

one of my first introductions to it was through tumblr, actually! i was a part of the “art journal” crowd & remember seeing a lot of really beautiful & innovative spreads

now my collaging practice most often takes place outside of journals, but there was a span of 3-4 years where i kept art journals & posted them online!

i was also an early fan of Rookie Mag’s collage kits

i remember being in awe of how they all got the “best stuff” for collaging, since so much of collaging ~au natural~ involves hours of flipping through old books & magazines that might turn up nothing of interest, or not quite what you’d hoped for aesthetically

having a ready-made collage kit felt a little bit like cheating actually

when did you first hear abt collaging??

hahaha I love that so much

the impulse to save things simply because they might one day make it into a collage is REAL

how often do you collage??

mmm yes i often get around to it once a week or once every two weeks since i’ve learned to be ok w picking up & putting down the same piece over several sessions!

it’s tough though it is the kind of activity that i feel is best when you can really get absorbed into it

i’m curious—what aspects of collaging feel like play to you?

excellent q! oddly enough it’s sometimes the physical demands of it (which seem minimal but definitely add up over time)--my neck gets super sore from hunching over pages & as a lefty scissors are not in general made for me lol so after a while my hands hurt too

I happened to stumble upon a veritable TREASURE TROVE of collaging material about a month ago—someone had left a box of old gardening/photography/gemstone/outer space books on the sidewalk outside their house for anyone to take

so i of course scooped them right up

& then had a collage-themed party w some friends which was excellent :)

what do you most often do with your collages once you’ve made them? & do you have any tips for someone just venturing into the ✨world of collage✨?

[re: the Ocean Vuong collages] THIS IS AMAZING

I’m noticing a really cool distinction in our collage styles—I love how yours have so much unity and you craft a singular, coherent scene that fills the page

great q! not to go tortured artist™ (tumblr teen™?) on you, but the real answer is that i often reach for collaging when i’m trying to process a difficult emotion

often heartbreak- or love-adjacent

as it will be

we humans r so simple & soft

but yeah! one time i made a series using texts from a person with whom i had/have a deeply complicated relationship & ended up showing them—they loved the collages, which was a sweet & confusing feeling. like in my head i’d made these sort-of-damning collages laying their words bare, & then they loved the art.

that sounds SO angsty teen of me

re: the playful tone, i definitely love not taking things too seriously or being too precious about my collages—i love humor and irony and playful dissonance, so my collages very often end up reflecting those predilections (biases?)

i was thrilled one time when i found a recipe for “naked ginger cake” in a food magazine to pair with a nude painting of a ginger in a book of klimt’s work

i love making little jokes out of the juxtaposition/proximity of different images

which reminds me!

i have this pet theory that collage is one of the mediums best suited to the ~current moment~ because in today’s world we’re almost inescapably inundated with images, phrases, ideas—and when you/if you turn to creating something of your own, often the most honest &/or valuable thing you can do is offer up your own idiosyncratic curation of of the images you’ve encountered. collage makes that curation physical/obvious—it’s like a physical trace of the unique pathway you took through the day’s/week’s/decade’s images.

how do you think about collage? does it feel like an old or new form of play to you, or somewhere in between? what feels different abt it to you than other mediums?

yooooo these are INCREDIBLE

I love love love those last two questions (& actually end up thinking about “intention” a lot both in terms of my personal practice & what i study—contemporary experimental poetry)

i feel like w AI systems like dallE everything they produce is always already collage, if that makes sense—they’re trained on images so every image they “create” is a modification or perversion or average of the images they’ve been fed

which is not that different from a person creating art, actually, if you want to get spooky/a little cynical!

there’s a line from Ginsberg’s “a supermarket in california” that i love & that feels applicable here: “in my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images…”

collaging = shopping for images? life = shopping for images too, sometimes?

[re: “were you hoping for a specific reaction?” q] & ha no, but i wonder if it speaks a little bit to how i think about the power of collage & maybe links back into that Picasso quote you pulled out—on collage having the ability to situate something in time as well as space. making those collages felt like both dredging up something from the past and relegating it to the past (ik i’m in danger of not making sense here)--like once it’s on paper and framed aesthetically it becomes a relic again, of a past way of thinking or feeling or speaking that now serves a new purpose (to be reflected upon! to be surprised by! to take issue with! to be in dialogue with a bunch of flowers or a sticker of an old-time telephone or a receipt or what have you!)

i wonder whether we’re circling around the idea of collage sometimes feeling transgressive, in an oddly low-stakes way—both in the activist way you looked into (so cool???) & the sheer-pleasure-of-ripping-up-something-that-was-intended-to-be-whole way

maybe also this links into surrealism

& not overly privileging or being too precious about reality?

which is something play does particularly well

ok FINAL QUESTION since we’re running out of time

give me a version of your ideal collage experience/environment/etc

what you’re working with, what you’re feeling, what it looks like

nature collaging sounds so lovely :’) reminds me of this artist who arranges flower petals onto t-shirts & then delicately hammers them to dye the t-shirts—that kind of dye fades after a couple washes so it’s a v ephemeral kind of beauty/art

[re: “feeling like i have all the time in the world”] gosh now THAT’S the dream ha

& I think my ideal ~collage scenario~ would actually be really similar to the party I hosted a couple weeks ago—surrounded by friends, massive piles of magazines and old books that everyone’s brought like we’re all crows amassing a treasure trove of the daily junk of life………………music playing, snacks scattered around, interrupting each other to stick cut-out images onto one another & peek at each other’s creations before they’re done

so! counting myself pretty lucky to have been able to experience what i guess is my Collage Dream:)

thank you so much for this discussion—you are brilliant & i learned so much about a form that i thought i knew pretty well (!!)