Collage Manifesto (part-3)

To simply state the obvious: We are well beyond its 10th Century inception when calligraphers began to apply glued paper when writing  poems and we are now past living among the troves of modernism. Wouldn't it make sense that the simple shift in the ideas and ways we make art must also forge a new direction? One perhaps more relevant to the times we live in and the ways in which we make things and comprehend newer ideas.

Collage is no longer about the combined image or the manipulation of several images to make a new one. Collage, “to glue” (coller), is more about the complex networking of simultaneous information composed, or even compressed, into a new visual typology. We are no longer reliant upon outdated printed data to receive information; ie: news. We are now conditioned to receive information via bits , dpi’s, and  jpegs, et.al. and at an alarming speed - it is right at our fingertips , all of it, all at the same time  - whether we want it there or not. In order to still navigate this rapidly flowing current of information we must learn how to see, read, and even hear multiple things at once. It’s a kind of an information mash-up. In the context of collage, it becomes the multiplicity of both additive and subtractive layering to arrive at a new composition which can hold our attention and satisfy our conditioning for multiple forms of stimulation. In fact, the term collage, to combine/ to glue, may be simply outdated. We are surrounded by information all the time, weather it be a magazine or an LED billboard with moving images, or at the gas station with a mini-commercial broadcasting information while our tanks are filling up, we are surrounded by all kinds of ways information is filtering into our lives. Both the medium and the message, to reference Marshall McLuhan, offers itself  to explore and expand beyond that one dimensional representation of the traditional flat image collage, so that we can now explore ways to incorporate multiple layers, textures and materials to create something new... something never seen before. The avant-garde is not back, but the mainstream art world has got to stop playing it safe and move beyond its love affair with the past.

My point of departure here is not to criticize the ways we receive information or how much of it by various digital technologies, but it is to promote (create) a new visual typology out of the visual chaos our brains are being conditioned to receive and process in different ways. There’s no better way to play with these ideas than  with collage.. Collage is the slowest evolving contemporary art form; It's time to change that!