What Is Collage? Making Pictures From Things That Were Already Something

A painted representation of a newspaper is a depiction, and a piece of actual newspaper glued to the same surface is the thing itself, occupying the picture rather than standing for something. That difference is what made the technique consequential when it appeared, since it broke the convention that a picture is a window onto a depicted space and insisted instead that it is a physical object with things on it. The introduced material carries its own associations, since a fragment of newspaper brings a date, a language and a subject with it, and those meanings operate alongside whatever the composition does. It also introduces a different kind of surface, so the work has real texture and real edges rather than illusions of them. Everything the technique achieves follows from that one move.

The technique has folk precedents and a specific art historical moment:

• •Pasted paper decoration has a long history in domestic and devotional craft across several cultures, including centuries of Japanese practice
• •Scrapbooks, valentines and pressed flower albums were widespread in the nineteenth century
• •Braque and Picasso introduced pasted paper into painting around 1912, which is the moment usually treated as the origin in fine art
• •Their use was formal at first, testing how a real material behaves against depicted space
• •Later movements took it up for political and disruptive purposes, which is a different project
• •Photomontage developed alongside and became a distinct practice with its own conventions

Different movements put the technique to incompatible purposes, which is why the word covers such varied work. Cubist use was analytical, using real materials to complicate the relationship between surface and depiction. Dada use was destructive and political, assembling torn fragments to attack the coherence of official culture, and its practitioners used photographic montage to make direct political statements in a period when doing so openly was dangerous. Surrealist use was associative, juxtaposing unrelated images to produce the disorientation the movement sought. Later practice has used it for accumulation, for autobiography through collected materials and for working with mass media imagery. The technique is unusually well suited to all of these because the introduced material always brings its origin with it, so whatever the artist does, the source is part of the meaning.

Works assembled from found materials age badly and present conservators with difficulties that a painting does not. Newsprint, the commonest introduced material in early examples, is acidic and yellows and embrittles within decades, and the acid migrates into whatever it touches. Adhesives fail, discolour or attack the support. The materials introduced were frequently chosen for their ordinariness rather than for permanence, which was sometimes the point, and preserving them means preserving things designed to be thrown away. Conservators face a question that is ethical rather than technical, since replacing a deteriorated newspaper fragment with a fresh one would preserve the appearance and destroy the object, while leaving it to fail respects the material and loses the work. The usual approach stabilises rather than restores and accepts visible ageing, which means the works now look older than the artists intended.

The principle spread well beyond visual art and the connections are direct rather than metaphorical. Musical practice adopted it through tape editing, through quotation and eventually through sampling, where a fragment of an existing recording appears in a new work carrying its origin with it, which is exactly the visual arrangement in another medium and which has produced comparable arguments about authorship and rights. Literary practice includes cut-up methods and found text. Film uses found footage. Digital practice made the technique nearly universal, since assembling existing images and sounds is now the default way most people make anything, and the questions raised in 1912 about whether an assembled work is original are being argued again in a new context. The technique's persistence suggests it answers something durable about how meaning is made from existing material.

Introducing real material means the work contains the thing rather than a depiction of it, which breaks the convention of a picture as a window and makes it an object with things on it. The material brings its own date, language and associations along. Cubist, Dada and Surrealist uses were incompatible in purpose. Sampling and found footage are the same move in other media.