“Son of Man

 You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images” (T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land) 

What if we only know broken images because we are broken images? And how do these pieces, these fragments fit together? 

For my Week 7 essay in Hilary, I made a collage. 

Let me explain myself. How on earth did I end up talking to an Oxford professor about a piece of cardboard covered in newspaper, photographs and printouts? Like most scandalous activities I engage in, my collage was conceived when my friend told me I should do something “crazy”. My topic for the week was Modernist visual art: I was asked to pick a specific type of Modernist art and trace it in relation to literature. 

As I was conspiring with ideas in the Southbank Centre in London (another rogue, impulsive move with the same friend), it seemed only fitting that I pick a form of art that I could imitate. I wanted my essay to not just talk about a form of art, but also capture the essence of that artistic genre itself. 

The following evening, I went to David Hockney’s exhibition Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away). A dark room with projections of Hockney’s work on all four walls, accompanied by his booming voiceover. 

As I watched, I was particularly struck by an image Hockney created of a boy in a bathtub. The artwork was created from polaroids, taken from a series of different angles around the boy, as he dunked himself under the water. Hockney’s voice called it a photographic collage, as he explained how the way we see is fragmented: we see in pieces that our mind then forms together. The way we see, the forms we appreciate, naturally form as collages. 

We see collages. 

John Berger, in his art-criticism, semi-collage, collection of essays Ways of Seeing, argues that the development of the camera allowed the “the totality of possible views taken from points around the object (or person) being depicted”. The eye captures like the camera. It sees from different angles, taking a disorganised whole, an unsure image, and making it whole. The mind, in response to collage, works similarly. 

Naturally, I decided that my essay needed to be on collages, in collage form. I went pretty meta: after all, I was creating a collage about collaging.  I would just like to clarify that I did write an essay, but I chopped it up and pasted it alongside a variety of images. Following some research, I realised that the collage “was coined  in 1912”, fitting perfectly in the time period I was studying. (The aforementioned friend has since made fun of me for arguing that there was no such thing as a collage pre-1912. The OED – English students know – will vouch for me on this, citing the first example of the work collage in 1915. *MIC-DROP I REST MY CASE*.) 

 I’m not going to lie, I was absolutely petrified before I handed it in to my tutor. I left it outside his door at 23:15 (admittedly 5 hours 15 minutes after the deadline) and made my way swiftly to Park End. The next morning – in the full beauty of post-Park End glory – I made my way very sheepishly across the street, back to my tutor’s office. Shaking violently, I entered the room and was – very surprisingly – commended for my “performative criticism”. I am fully aware I got off absolutely scot-free. 

What possessed me to leave a human-sized piece of cardboard outside his door? Suddenly, I’d lost all my words and wasn’t really sure how to speak. I essentially told him I thought it would be cool. He was less amused. 

When he asked what I thought about collages place in the Modernist movement, I said, 

“I’m not really sure where it fits.” 

He laughed and told me that “that’s the point”. Collages are designed to not make sense. To be confused and confusing. Functioning as a mess. 

Picasso and Braque first used the collage to represent the metropolis as disjunct and moving. Like the city, the collage moves on the page. It is ever-growing and ever-changing. The college is designed, not for the artist, but for the viewer.

 To create a collage, you take the pieces of your quotidian experience and re-piece them together. You take fragments of past wholes, and make a new future whole, creating a patchwork of different pieces. In a world filled with the urban junk, urban pieces, of mass consumerism, it makes sense that artists – visually, literally, musically – take pieces of the pre-existing and re-work them, rewrite them. Collaging seems to be a way of writing the future from the past. 

To create a collage, you take the pieces of your quotidian experience and re-piece them together. To give life to a collage, you look at it and let its pieces move about in your head. Like our mental spaces, the collage is disorganised, fractured, unfluid. Yet from this breaking, there seems to be a kind of perfection. Every piece has a new place; every word has new, superimposed meanings.

A critic, commenting on Monet’s impressionist painting Waterlilies stated “the only proper reaction would be to dive into it and drown”. Like impressionist paintings, collages are composed of many parts that the individual eyes, and minds, piece together. It does often feel like an exercise in drowning. An exercise in shifting through the thickness of the water. The thick excess. The excess of pieces around us. The collage has an excess of meanings – intentional and unintentional – that bombard us to the point that it all practically feels pointless. The excesses of the everyday – photographs, newspaper cuttings, magazine images, sheet music – allow the collage-maker to rework the world. As they take pieces of life, they give them a new life. The world is allowed to re-live, re-move. 

How does a piece of Visual Art move? Perhaps, more poignantly, I might ask how we move? 

We move as we choose to. 

So then, does art. This emphasis on the viewer allows the individual to be seen in art. The way you view a collage simultaneously makes it, and you, unique. As you look at a collage, you aren’t just seeing a piece of work: you are also seeing yourself. A moving, impermanent figure. As Berger states, “the way in which each sees the other confirms his own view of himself”. I don’t think this just applies to people. It also applies to art. Our selves, our beings, are products of others and otherings: a collage of many pieces, many eyes, many people, many words, many interactions. 

If we use collage as a metaphor for viewing ourselves, we are offered an entire new perspective on what we actually are. Collages are the most accurate physical example of human selves: they are composed of fragmented, broken, overlapping pieces. As the collage-maker cuts and pastes pieces of their life together, so do we as we form and fashion the reality of our identity. Instead, this time, the pieces of the collage are other people, places and moments, thrust together onto the slate of our individual bodies.

Like the collage, identity is non-linear – it is always jumping about, in constant flux, never trapped in stasis, flickering between moments – and yet, each individual part is necessarily in the context of the collage’s formation. Each individual fragment necessitates the greater whole. When forming our identities we are constantly cutting and pasting; covering over old parts, highlighting recurring words and phrases, drawing links between images and texts that stand next to each other. 

As the collage-maker collects pieces to collage, they remember and re-remember the fragments. There is a re-remembering, a newness to the past. A refashioning of excess. Like an identity, it is reworked. Beautifully tragic. Even tragically beautiful. Wholes made from pieces (like the human self). Surely we know the heap of broken images because they are ourselves? Help me lay them out – in whatever order you choose. 

GRAB A GLUE STICK and start piecing yourself together.