The Ends of Collage

The Ends of Collage is an attempt to reflect on the physical place where collage fulfils its calling and distinguishes itself from other forms of artistic making. The ends, or edges of a collage mark the sites of interaction where one piece of paper – picture, surface or text – is juxtaposed with another. Yet the notion of ‘ends’ in this context also implies a historical paradigm, one that considers collage as part of a particular period in time which I argue to have emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century and came to a close in the late 1970s with the emergence of a new material, technological and ideological reality that constituted the dawn of the digital age as well as the Postmodern moment. These abovementioned formal and historical paradigms are joined in this thesis in order to serve as the principal prism through which I examine the work of four artists who adopted collage into their practice as a fundamental question to guide their artistic pursuits. Following an introductory chapter itself titled ‘The Ends of Collage’, the first of five main chapters surveys the many definitions that have mapped the activity of collage so far. The second concerns a group of works from 1919-23 by the German artist Max Ernst known as ‘seamless collages’, so-called due to the absence of physical evidence that testifies to their making. Chapter three explores a group of works from 1927-30 by the Belgian artist René Magritte that transpose collage directly into the medium of painting, with paradoxical effect. Chapter four is concerned with the early work of the American artist Sherrie Levine from 1973-80, particularly her engagement with pre-modern practices associated primarily with women and still regarded as detached from art history per se. Chapter five addresses the work of the British artist John Stezaker from the years 1970-78, and his development of the term ‘photo-collage’ to distinguish his work from that of Dada and Surrealist predecessors. Those chapters in their turn are bounded by two edited conversations, titled ‘Ends I’ and ‘Ends II’ respectively, between myself and artists Richard Prince, Linder Sterling, John Stezaker and theorist David Campany, conducted in the course of several curatorial projects undertaken in parallel with this research. Further Appendices are provided.