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Collage (from French coller, ‘to stick’) is an art-technique in which objects are stuck on to the surface of a work of art and incorporated in its composition. The technique is common in folk art, for example in the religious sculpture of some African and Caribbean peoples, created not by carving but by assembling pre-existing objects to make masks or totems. In fine art, collage was rare until Western painters began using it at the start of the 20th century. The Cubists incorporated pieces of newspaper, bus tickets, scraps of menus and other objects into their pictures, and the Surrealists went even further, creating whole pictures from an apparently random assemblage of ‘found objects’. Picasso made collage-sculpture, turning such objects as bicycle handlebars, woodchips and screws into works of art. In the 1960s, Rauschenberg stuck car tyres, US flags, even a stuffed goat into his sculptures, making art out of the juxtaposition of objects which never lost their own identity rather than (as most earlier painters had done) using the scraps for their aesthetic qualities alone or for the effect they made in the whole montage.
In music, the term collage is used of works in which snippets of other compositions are inserted—not so much quoted and reworked (as in parody) as stuck on willy-nilly. The most often-quoted examples are the fragments of hymn-tunes and popular marches which pop up in the works of Charles Ives—a talking-point in their day because few other composers followed his example. But in electronic music, musique concrète and postmodern music, collage is standard practice, and a number of ‘main-stream’ classical composers, for example Copland, Shostakovich and Tippett, have also used it. Perhaps because of stringent copyright laws, the technique is rarely used in pop and rock music; more often, a line or chord sequence may be ‘sampled’—that is, assimilated into the general texture and worked on in the same way as original material. Rap, however, often uses such sampling in a collage-like way, short bursts of the distorted sound of a pre-existing record being inserted into the backing texture.
In the 1980s, makers of television adverts experimented with collage. Using computer technology, they inserted modern actors into sequences of old film, or showed the actors in older films using the modern products; new soundtracks were often dubbed in to reinforce the message. A few mainstream film-makers have adopted the technique: examples are Woody Allen\'s Zelig, in which he inserts himself into a variety of famous historical scenes, appearing at Hitler\'s side during the Nuremberg Rally or with Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference, and Carl Reiner\'s Dead Men Don\'t Wear Plaid, in which Steve Martin, as a 1940s private eye, exchanges wisecracks with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Myrna Loy. KMcL |
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