Benoit Depelteau reviews this collage exhibition at one of Montreal’s favourite art spots.
“The interest of such a show is to offer a panorama of the different practices in collage at the moment. Like a snapshot, it documents the vivacity of Montreal’s scene.”
January 27 to April 23, 2012
John Stezaker
at Kemper Museum
The exhibition reveals his lifelong fascination with the potent force of images, showcasing his investigations into the ways visual language can create meanings that vary dramatically according to context.
We’ve entered a new art scene; one where everybody wants to collage. Cut and paste just feels so right. Maybe it’s because that’s one of the first things we learn to do creatively. It makes sense that art has gone in this direction—collage is usually easier, faster, more available, and more versatile. Masterpieces are less time-consuming. This “unconventional” technique can be just as expressive as any other, and it is quickly becoming more of a driving force than traditional art. I feel that, in some ways, collage represents our way of coping with the ever-changing modern world. The cities we live in have an impact on us, and we express them in the way we create.
Why collage? Why is it relevant today? So many things come to my mind.
First of all, I could say that collage played a significant role at the beginning of modern art when Picasso and Braque started to assemble what they found in their studio on a cardboard. They would meet almost every night to talk about their discoveries…
Remake the world. Take it apart and put it back together again. Collage is the language of revolution: of re-ordering the world; taking things apart at the seams and stitching something new together in its place. Collage is an act of integration, a radical project of unity through non-conformity.
The collage artist is a thief, a baby stealer, someone who in plain daylight, and with pride, walks up to a stroller and walks away with a child. The child is raised in the isolation of the studio and put back into the world and left to defend itself on the pages of a magazine or the walls of a gallery, or some other nasty places children get themselves lost these days…
The first cut is the deepest. I encountered the collage at the age of 12 through album covers of the Beatles and Frank Zappa. Also, their music went hand in hand with collage. Early post production. I was very young, everything was possible, collage became my means of expression. A true collage kid. I cut up pictures, texts, films and music. Collage was, in my experience, rooted in pop culture; the history of modern art came to me years later, but it was not a big surprise when I found out that the Beatles had collaborated with Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton – two of the major figures in British pop art. So from early on in my life I have more or less been glued to the collage.
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