Collage as Method, Manuscript and Moving Image: Cutting Edge

Claire Zimmerman, 'Alison’s Mind: Collage and Architectural Thinking in Postcolonial Britain'

Some time in the 1950s, Alison Smithson took a copy of Charles Knight’s Old England: a Pictorial Museum of Regal, Ecclesiastical, Municipal, Baronial, and Popular Antiquities of 1845, and began filling it with images. Over the next four decades, she created a collage work of astonishing depth and thickness, with images culled from a heterogeneous array of material. The source and substrate of this years-long collage, a book of 478 pages in two volumes, was hardly distant from the concerns Smithson pursued elsewhere. A wide variety of lithographed images of artefacts, buildings and mise-en-scène fill its pages, drawn from the English past or from its encounter with other lands. The end result is a massive object, its binding strained by the material interleaved throughout its pages. This paper presents the fragile scrapbook for the first time, considering the unfolding dialogue between the book’s images and Smithson’s continuously layered additions throughout its pages and over an extended time frame. A private sourcebook, the book records collage as an artist’s working method, showing its utility for the generation of new ideas and suggesting corollaries between mental image-making and material output.

While the precise sequence and order in which Smithson filled the pages of the book are impossible to reconstruct (she did not work from front to back), nonetheless the early pages suggest an ongoing dialogue between book and architect, where images of medieval moats, monuments and abodes recall projects that she and Peter Smithson projected or executed in their architectural work. Set against her life, the scrapbook illuminates the fate of a highly intelligent, ambitious woman nonetheless thwarted by oppressive gender prejudice and cut-throat professional competition in post-war British architecture. Similar collage works by others in the IG group, most notably Nigel Henderson’s scrapbooks in the Tate collections, evince similarity in kind and radical difference of degree in the end results. As a private sourcebook, the scrapbook offers a window into Smithson’s working methods, allowing viewers access to one of the least-filtered outputs of her creative intelligence. Taken together with Smithson’s thesis, her forays into creative writing, her graphic work and her international correspondence with fellow travellers, such as Charles and Ray Eames, the scrapbook represents an under-explored record of architectural thought in post-war Britain. The paper is a first step in parsing the rapidly decaying scrapbook to help understand the workings of one of the most important minds of post-war architecture culture, situated within a changing postcolonial landscape in which the very concept of Englishness – of nationhood itself – is put on display. At a moment when this concept has resurged in the United Kingdom as elsewhere, we might consider the scrapbook as Alison’s record of rapidly changing national identity, with images of international consumer culture covering and nearly obliterating the English source material over which she mounted them.

Judah Attille, 'DRFF2021, A Considered Cut'

A Considered Cut, produced for Collage as Method, Manuscript and Moving Image: Cutting Edge, is an introduction to an interdisciplinary practice-based 16mm film enquiry. The award-winning short film, Dreaming Rivers (1988), is used in a peer process, presenting evidence to consider what images are in a digital media environment, and what we want images to do. The presentation includes 10-minutes of digitised animated 16mm film by the collaborators.

In the workshop, Dreaming Rivers Found Footage 2021 (DRFF2021), ‘cut’ and ‘mark’ are an invitation into a relationship with permissions, ideas, materials, and somatic awareness. This first iteration was an opportunity to see what happens when an interdisciplinary group comes together to discover each other’s practice through an exchange of skills, to explore new ways to access ideas and expand our cognitive capacity through experiential learning. This pre-recorded presentation serves as an extension of an invitation to those interested in this current work. DRFF2021 is a 16mm experiment in which film is opened at its most vulnerable access point, the surface of its celluloid materiality. It is an independent virtual 16mm film research project hosted by London based artist workers’ cooperative, not/nowhere.

Research participants include me, Judah Attille, Somatic acting artist-researcher-educator, Christina Kapadocha, Artist, educator, author, researcher, Ilga Leimanis, Independent curator and writer, Taylor Le Melle with Filmmaker Ibrahim Kargbo, Artist-filmmaker, Rhea Storr. Together, we have secured a virtual environment to instigate a critical enquiry into performativity, time-based cut, and the animated mark. In film and video making terms, the cut is used in linear and non-linear editing to transition from one scene or image to the next in the montage process. In the film, Dreaming Rivers (1988), the value of the cut, as a device for moving between locations in consciousness, was borrowed from Attille’s reading of the iconic collage by artist Sonia Boyce, She Ain’t Holding Them Up, She’s Holding On (Some English Rose),1986.

In 2019, inspired by the Black and POC-centred Found Footage workshops at not/nowhere led by Storr, Attille entered an extended conversation with the cooperative, for their consideration of the title Dreaming Rivers (1988) as ‘found footage’ at the centre of a series of targeted workshops. Practice involves marking an entire 30-minute 16mm print guided by Storr’s knowledge of the mathematics of the persistence of vision, the properties of celluloid, mark-making techniques, tools, and chemicals, combined with somatic methodology introduced by Kapadocha and drawing strategies introduced by Leimanis. DRFF2021 has become a site of investigation for the sustainability of critical thinking in an interdisciplinary collaborative artists’ virtual environment. It is a non-hierarchical practice to explore the sustainability of transformational ideas and commitment to acts of care and preservation in the conservation conventions of critically complex material objects. The purpose is to examine potentials for access to changed archival and curatorial practices, to harness energies of films produced out of complex artistic, political, and cultural junctures.

The individual participants of DRFF2021 have collaborated in a dialogic exchange, to access gesture making strategies from each of our disciplines. The enquiry includes an understanding of how a somatic intervention prepares an ‘actor’ at the point of mark-making, the outcomes of transferring drawing skills from non-time-based media to the time-based medium of film and the potential of collage as an aid for planning. The cut lands varyingly. It finds its meanings as a type of intervention to invite reflection into the framing of interdisciplinary critical thinking.

Dreaming Rivers (1988) written and directed by Martina Attille for Sankofa Film & Video is distributed in the UK by Lux Moving Image and in the USA by Women Make Movies and Third World Newsreel.

DRFF2021 Collaborators

• Judah Attille
• Christina Kapadocha
• Ibrahim Kargbo
• Ilga Leimanis
• Taylor Le Melle
• Rhea Storr