Reassessing Collage and Photo-collage: from Avant-gardes towards Artificial Intelligence
Emerging from 19th-century personal postcards and photo albums, and later employed in advertising (Chéroux 2015), collage and photo-collage were embraced by the early 20th-century Avant-garde artists as a revolutionary language, challenging established codes and conventions in art. The two techniques developed in close relation to other verbal montages within the Cubist and Futurist experimentations (Poggi 1992), as well as in socialist-oriented Dadaist magazines (Bergius 2000) and Surrealists’ circles (Ades 1976; Adamowicz 1998). In these contexts, the collage was approached through multiple angles (Lamberti-Messina 2007), as can be deducted from the statements of Max Ernst, who considers it as a medium able to allow “the masterly irruption of the irrational into all areas of art, poetry, science, fashion, the private lives of individuals and the public lives of peoples” (Ernst 1936).
The hybridity of the procedure made the collage and photo-collage suitable for various possible artistic fields: from the execution of architectural plans and fashion sketches to advertising graphics, from the mise en page of magazines and books to exhibition displays, films, and artworks (Dragu 2020). From this point of view, the new image, fragmented and reassembled, intended above all to provoke brief circuits of meaning, form, and perception, questioning the very concept of representation and reality of the image. Significantly, collage continues today to be a technique used by contemporary artists to break the unity and linearity of many aspects of social and historical narratives, producing unexpected associations between heterogeneous elements. Recent studies in visual culture (Somaini 2023) and computer science (Buschek 2024) have highlighted the parallels between the mechanisms of Avant-garde collage – in particular Surrealists – and those of Artificial Intelligence, passing from a form of “psychic automatism” to a kind of “algorithmic automation” (Somanini 2023).
By looking at collage and photo-collage transnationally and through the prism of interdisciplinarity, we invite scholars from a wide range of perspectives to reflect on this artistic technique and the intrinsic value of ‘cut and paste’ that collage has since its very beginning up to recent applications with digital tools: its functioning in fragmenting and recomposing visual and textual contents can be seen as a basis of many operations of Artificial Intelligence and its algorithmic process.
Session Convenors:
Caterina Caputo, University of Venice IUAV
Carlotta Castellani, University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”
Speakers:
Lucy Byford, Constructor University, Bremen
Reconstructing the Dada Period Eye: Photomontage, Détournement, and John Heartfield’s Who is the most beautiful?? (1919)
Berlin Dada photomontage is typically characterised by the technique’s compositional containment of heterogenous photographic fragments, generating highly irrational constructions and grotesque hybrids. John Heartfield’s montaged ‘Beauty competition’, produced for the cover of the Dada magazine Jedermann sein eigener Fussball (Everyman his own Football), appears to apply this strategy through a gendered parody in its discordant placement of the male members of Germany’s interim republican government onto the feminised and domestic object of a fan. Yet a previously unconsidered source for this photomontage prompts a reconsideration of the perceived incongruity and subsequent absurdity of such imagery. Using the case study of Heartfield’s Wer ist der Schönste?? as its point of departure, the paper seeks to recalibrate our conceptions of some of the earliest examples of Dada photomontage; widening understandings of this Berlin Dadaist medium beyond a visuality rooted in shock and concerned primarily with the tension between its constituent parts, and towards a tool that frequently employed détournement in the context of the vernacular. The paper will additionally consider how these early strategies fed into Heartfield’s later practice of photographic editing for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, examining the ways in which these works pre-empt the ‘uncanny valley’ aesthetics that proliferate synthetic AI images.
Marco Scotti, University of Venice IUAV
Collage as a design strategy / Collage as an artistic language. Ettore Sottsass practice in the 1940s and 1950s.
In the years following Italy emergence from World War II, commissions were limited and designers had to confront difficult realities, while the cultural system reflected a deep social and economic crisis. For an architect like Ettore Sottsass, who was early in his professional career and simultaneously increasingly immersed in the artistic culture of abstraction – he was also starting a parallel career as a painter, while organizing important lectures and exhibitions – a technique like collage represented both an extraordinary research opportunity and a design tool to tackle his professional assignments as a graphic designer.
If economic motivations during the 1940s and 1950s led various figures, connected to design culture and with a different educational background, to take on assignments for companies and industries, Ettore Sottsass case was particularly significant, as the fluidity between disciplines would become a defining feature of his work.
This study aims to investigate, starting from Ettore Sottsass’s personal and professional archives and unpublished materials, his design practices and methodologies based on the use of collage, comparing them with his contemporary artistic research in the visual arts, exploring their historical models to define how these were reinterpreted into a personal but highly expressive vocabulary of forms.
Giorgio Di Domenico, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
The ‘Personal’ Origins of Robert Rauschenberg’s Collage: Scatola Personale, ca. 1952
Robert Rauschenberg’s practice represented one of the most radical explorations of the potential of collage and photo-collage in the second half of the twentieth century. The artist started using collage in some of his earliest bodies of works, which he created at Black Mountain College and then in New York, Europe and North Africa between 1950 and 1953. These include Scatole personali (Italian for Personal Boxes), minute boxes containing collected items, often covered with collage, exhibited in Rome and Florence in 1953. One of these boxes, now in the Menil Collection in Houston [1992-04 DJ], will be the subject of this paper. Building on a direct analysis of the work and an investigation of its context, it will address the techniques Rauschenberg used and some of his possible references. The paper will focus on the relationship between the box, Surrealist collage, and the work of Joseph Cornell, as well as the identification of the materials Rauschenberg used (including book clippings, scraps of paper, photographs he took, illustrations, etc.), the interactive nature of the Scatola, and its early Italian reception. Exploring the various layers of materials that envelop the box and assessing their relationship to its mysterious content, it will try to decipher its ‘personal’ message and how collage was instrumental in conveying it.
Hana Gründler, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Fragmenting Ideology. Collage as Politics in the Unofficial Art of the ČSSR
Since its beginnings, collage has been understood as a visually revolutionary and politically provocative medium. The disruptive dimensions of collage, which literally fragments apparently stable meaning, feature heavily in the oeuvre of two Czechoslovakian artists from the so-called unofficial art scene. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, the poet and visual artist Jiří Kolář and the filmmaker Jan Švankmajer consciously resorted to collage, a technique that had been criticized by the official cultural doctrine of Socialist Realism for being counter-revolutionary. This paper looks at how these artists used collage, chiasmage and montage in order to break up linear temporalities and established narratives. In doing so, they deconstructed ideological – in this case socialist – notions of “reality” and “truth”. I argue that both Kolář and Švankmajer make the beholder experience that seeing is not merely a passive act of perception, but a critical process that allows new meanings to emerge. Thus, both the act of seeing and collage practices harbor emancipatory and liberatory potential.
Maria Rossa, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
Glued collage, Simulated collage: Erotic photography in the works of Italian artists between the 1960s and 1970s
On December 2, 1966, the first issue of “Men – Il settimanale degli uomini” was released on Italian newsstands, soon followed by a proliferation of similar editorial initiatives. The visual reservoir of Italian artists was thus enriched with a renewed consciousness and an unprecedented availability of erotic subjects, which in those same years would be variously re-elaborated in their works. Some artists cut out the photographs and glued them directly onto the support, others used a process that was technically different from collage but similarly responsive to the restitution of the image in its original photographic evidence. Still others selected only some components – the accessories, the poses of the models – and reproduced them pictorially or graphically in the context of new compositions. Different techniques, different purposes of use. The reason for the use of erotic photography indicates a precise choice of field, which depends both on the artist’s stance on the contemporary debate and on the meaning that such imagery assumes when it is used. Through the erotic works by Massimo Pellegrini, Attilio Steffanoni and Lucia Marcucci the phases of the so-called process of sexual liberation will be retrace, questioning the meaning assumed from time to time by the use of erotic photography and a certain artistic technique to bring it to canvas.
Sara Molho, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna
Great Conspiracies: Collage, Copy Art and Mail Art in 80s Italy
At the dawn of the eighties, some Italian experiments with the photocopier – halfway between subcultural expression and visual art, closely related to punk graphics and their avant-gardist roots – systematically reused pre-existing visual material through collage, photocollage, and photocopying. This cut-and-paste served as a tactic to respond to the overproduction of images by contemporary mass media, such as television, in the early works by Piermario Ciani (now in Fondo Ciani, Archivio del ’900, Mart – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto). Crossing photography, xerography, and collage, in the early eighties Ciani pictured the post-punk scene in Pordenone, known as Great Complotto, and promoted a fictional band, Mind Invaders, anticipating the creative media critique of the Luther Blissett Project, of which he was a member. Moreover, the project he developed with the artists Vittore Baroni and Massimo Giacon, “Trax” (1981-1987), bridged mail art and post-industrial music, creating a wide circuit of tapes, records, and various kinds of ephemera. Although analogue, it emerged from a multitude of people playing with collective names, questioning authorship and the contemporary mass media landscape by creating an alternative network. In this context, it is clear how tools such as the photocopier anticipated many features of digital art, as noted by Escribano Belmar and Alcalá Mellado (2019).
Thinking of collage as a tactic, rather than a technique related to specific material conditions (Etgar 2019), this paper will examine the network and artifacts of Ciani and “Trax”, their connections with contemporary Italian punk and post-punk collage, and with critical explorations of media.
Annabel Pretty, Unitec, Aotearoa New Zealand
Parafictions: Anatomy of the Digital Follie
Parafictions: Anatomy of the Digital Follie investigates the intersection of digital ecologies and Deleuze’s concept of experimental assemblages (Dovey, 2013), where disparate elements converge to create innovative configurations, particularly in the realm of digital creativity and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) imagery. This study introduces the notion of ‘digital-follies’—multiple-reality architectures situated at the threshold of GenAI’s development in the context of text-to-image generation. Here, the digital-follie serves as a ‘probable’ hyperreal assemblage, constructed from diverse photographic components (Pretty & Manfredini, 2022), creating a whimsical structure within the digital landscape.
Stuart Candy’s ‘Future Cone’ (Candy & Potter, 2019) informs the exploration of these structures as potential futures within the realms of imagination and conceptual possibility. Additionally, Michael Young’s term ‘parafiction’ (Lambert-Beatty, 2009) and Aaron Betsky’s reference to Matta-Clark’s ‘Anarchitecture’ (Ursprung & Matta-Clark, 2011) further complexify the interpretive vocabulary for these virtual constructs.
One could conjecture that the plastic (Malabou, 2010) image GenAI functions as a cooperative endeavour, sourcing pixels and data from a vast array of existing images, including one’s own unwitting potential contributions, via multitudinous social media posting—repackaging them as seamless hyperreal photomontages. This phenomenon mirrors Deleuze’s notions of ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘reterritorialisation’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) within the digital paradigm. Such GenAI-driven imagery can be considered ‘spolia of the internet’ (Pevsner, 2017), borrowing fragments of pre-existing visual culture. The digital-follie thus stands as a metaphorical echo of historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde aesthetics seen in publications like Cosmorama, Le Carré Bleu, and Casabella, reimagined in the digital age.
Leya Fang, Renmin University of China
Reinventing Chinese Characters with AI: Collaged Hanzi as an Intercultural Artistic Practice
Chinese character (Hanzi) is a system of written language in China, and its invention can be traced back to 14th century BC. There are about 100,000 meaningful Chinese characters that have been invented. Nowadays, a series of fake Chinese characters permeate visual art. The most well-known artistic practice with fake Chinese characters is the Book from the Sky (Tianshu) by Chinese artist XU Bing, who invented thousands of fake hanzi as visual art with the collage of Chinese-character-components. He also created some false characters which look like Chinese calligraphy but constituted with English letters, rendering these collaged fake characters into media for intercultural communication. What’s more, fake hanzi also appears in digital arts, especially in the image generated by artificial intelligence. Some of them are unintended: an AI video example released by OpenAI Sora depicts a scene of Chinese New Year celebration, and the Chinese character on the Loong (Chinese dragon) was a faked one, which was actually a collage generated by AI model. The attitude of indifference towards fake Chinese characters in these images manifests a techno-Orientalism in Western-centered AI models. There are also well-intended ones: David Ha, a Japanese research scientist at Google Brain in Tokyo, invented a system to create fake kanzi (Japanese-Chinese character), and this AI system attaches meanings to some invented fake Chinese characters, conveying intercultural messages with these symbolic kanzi-collages. My research focuses on these artistic practices with AI-generated fake hanzi, examining how it functions as an intercultural medium in a global context.