“Kolaj Past & Future” by Benoit Depelteau
This eighth issue of Kolaj wraps up the second year of our existence. One of the reasons we started this project was to add our own voice to all of those who thought that collage needed and deserved to be shown in professional institutions. While it sometimes seems like we started this project yesterday, it has evolved since then and, happily, so did the perception of collage.
At the begining, I remember that we had to go through a serious amount of research to find a few collage exhibitions to cover. We were glad that Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York City and Gallery 6 PDX in Portland, the first spaces exclusively dedicated to the exhibition of collage, existed. Along with a few university-affiliated galleries run by collage admirers, these precursors provided more than their share of content in our first issues. Apart from those, our findings were too often small events outside of the gallery network.
Two years later, the reality has significantly changed. A ever increasing number of galleries have shown interest in and even represent collage artists. Regularly, we meet more people, gallery owners, artists, and writers, whose enthusiasm and dedication to collage is contagious. While we still do much research, we receive enough information about collage exhibitions to be able to make announcements on a nearly weekly basis.
During this eight issue span, our team of collaborators grew to witness the ever increasing number of collage manifestations all over the world. But we, the Kolaj team, always kept a close eye on what was happening in our beloved hometown of Montreal. This month, our excitement reached a new height with the presentation of Collages: Gesture and Fragments at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art. Unlike shows recently presented in other museums, often dedicated to the practice of well-established artists like Kurt Schwitters at Tate Britain or Robert Motherwell at the Guggenheim, this time the focus was on collage itself.
From what we’ve seen so far, the transition from web sensation to alternative spaces and then to professional galleries and art fairs has been stellar. But how will collage manage the transition to museums? How will big institutions deal with an art form that is accessible, often small and whose preservation has yet to be fully understood? How will they archive and classify an art form that has rarely been named as such? How will they define the boundaries of the process relative to the finished work?
These questions bring a whole new level to our interest. Issues often fervently discussed in editorial meetings, but that we certainly never thought we would have to tackle so soon. We were impatient to witness a change in the perception of collage, but now we are even more excited to document its practice as it is taken to the next step in its constant evolution.
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Image:
Basic Material by Time
by Ben West
18″x14″
paper on card
2013
Image courtesy of the artist