Mash-Up: The Enduring Fusion of High Art & Mass Culture

Abstract

Mash-UpThe Enduring Fusion of High Art & Mass Culture Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Alexey Kondakov [End Page 121] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Adam, Eve & Medor, Rennes, France, 2009 In 1912 at his Boulevard Raspail studio in Montparnasse, Picasso hung a changing installation of collages on a beige wall over a cot scattered with pillows and papers. He displayed six or seven pieces of new work selected from the nearly hundred collages he had created that year. Most notably, he shared variations on a study of a guitar, a paste-up of wallpaper and cardboard on newsprint. When artists heard about Picasso's new work, they flocked to his small studio to get a look. Intrigued by the method, futurists such as Gino Severini, Umberto Boccioni, and Giacomo Balla began using collage as a method of enriching the surfaces of their works. Picasso's displays of simple cutting and pasting of the detritus of daily life were declared "a pasted-paper revolution." The idea moved quickly; collage became a favorite medium among international modernists for [End Page 122] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Mickey Mouse Is Dead, Paris, 2009 [End Page 123] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Clair-obscur, Saint-Malo, France, 2010 its playful, ephemeral style and quick, spontaneous process—what Picasso called "one mad rush." ________ Picasso's work on collage had really begun five years before, when he forged an artistic friendship with Georges Braque. The French artist often compared their closeness to "two mountain climbers tethered together," and for years, in the evenings, they visited each other's studios to critique the day's work. They challenged each other to discover new techniques. When Braque began to add sand, cinder, sawdust, and coffee grounds to his works to increase the texture of his images, it launched in Picasso a flurry of activity. "I am using your latest papery and powdery methods," he wrote to Braque in a letter. He was referring to the scraps of wallpaper, sheet music, and oilcloth that he was pasting to his canvases. For Braque and Picasso, the medley of scraps salvaged from [End Page 124] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Escaping Criticism, Paris, 2011 ordinary existence and employed in their work replicated the chaotic spirit of the times. By coupling unlikely images and materials, they were commenting on the frenetic world of modern Europe, with its escalating technologies, proliferation of handbills and posters, and blaring newspaper headlines of mounting political unrest. While the explicit definition of collage refers to the pasting-on of scraps that originate beyond the artist's studio, the definition loosened as different artistic traditions engaged the practice and made it their own, and the technique evolved. The futurists embraced the fundamentals of collage, but the Dadaists found the method too dainty and precious for a crumbling civilization on the brink of disaster. Artists such as John Heartfield and Hannah Höch explored Picasso's and Braque's innovations in photomontage, releasing them from standard artistic [End Page 125] Click for larger view View full resolution Alexey Kondakov limitations in favor of foraging for and then reassembling fragments of photographic material. Through the process of cutting and pasting ready-made images from cast-off periodicals, they became, as Heartfield describes, "engineers" who sought to express the absurd nature of the times. While the basic technique of cutting and pasting offered the Dadaists a way to dissolve barriers between fine art and wider culture, the surrealists reveled in collage's tendency to synthesize contradictory pictorial elements, which perfectly suited their recurring themes of the unreliability of logic, the value of dream, and the embrace of the absurd. Selecting, arranging, and making connections between disparate images gave their compositions a higher level of expressiveness and emotional impact. In their associative leaps and juxtaposed imagery, the pieces became [End Page 126] Click for larger view View full resolution Alexey Kondakov came picture-poems of a world that existed somewhere between imagination and reality. In the 1940s, when artists and intellectuals escaping World War II made New York City the new hub of modern...