Cuts, Copies, Clips and the Curatorial: Cutting Edge

Ben Cranfield, 'Fragmenting Practices of the Contemporary: The Queer Timeliness of the Collage and the Curatorial'

The paradox of the long-century of mass-media is that the greater the reach of communication technologies, the greater the sense of fragmentation. It is therefore unsurprising that two of the most significant cultural practices to emerge from the mass-media age are collaging and curating, both of which are concerned with the assembly and re-grounding of fragments. It is equally unsurprising that when London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) was founded in 1947 with the specific aim to be contemporary, it quickly became home to experiments in both practices. So how did collage and curating fulfil the ICA’s mandate to be contemporary? Indeed, what types of contemporariness (modes of being with time) do the collage and the curatorial produce?

To explore this question, I will examine a series of fragmentary archival moments, relating to the ICA’s first twenty years, that attempted to speak to the contemporary moment through practices of assembly. Starting with fragments of quotes from the promotional material for the exhibitions, Collages and Objects (1954) and 3 Collagists (1958), I shall call forth a collage of fragments from the ICA’s archive to demonstrate that the collage and the curatorial, as spaces of manifest fragmentation and (re)assembly, create, through a dialectic of the overlap (the collage) and the gap (the curatorial), the fundamental condition of contemporaneity: the desire for, but impossibility of, being with-time. Furthermore, I will argue that these ways of relating to time, through the spatial practice of assembly, allow for a particular queer relationship to culture to emerge, informed by Sara Ahmed’s notion that queerness is a question of orientation. I will examine how these fragments could be reorientated to create a non-normative relationship to time and to the productive logic of the post-war city. Drawing on formative work of Cultural Studies in Britain, especially Raymond William’s idea of the emergent and the residual and Stuart Hall’s work on encoding and decoding, combined with José Esteban Muñoz’s idea that there is queer value in the ephemeral, I will argue that the collagic and the curatorial are vital to processes of cultural identification and categorisation, and their subversion.

Craig Buckley, 'An Architecture of Clipping: Reyner Banham and the Redefinition of Collage'

In the early 1960s, the critic Reyner Banham developed a theory of ‘Clip-On architecture’ which theorised a changing attitude to industrial assembly in the work of an emerging generation of architects such as Cedric Price and Archigram. Clip-On Architecture, he argued, eschewed the pre-war aspiration to reshape production by inserting the architect into industry, rather it embraced a more indeterminate sense of form resulting from the impermanent and expendable assembly of technologies and materials appropriated from different domains. Banham’s theory has typically been understood in terms of changes in industrial prefabrication, yet this paper mounts a different interpretation: Banham’s ‘clip-together’ vision of architecture intimately reflected period practices for clipping printed matter. Practices of collecting and extracting material from large-format, colour magazines has long been given an important place in accounts of pre-war collage and montage practices within London’s Independent Group, in which Banham played a key role. Such clipping has often been associated with the scrapbook and the post-war phenomenon of the tackboard, yet I will argue that it also reflected the rise of a very different process: the archiving and manipulation of information associated with the rise of industrial clippings bureaus. An emphasis on practices of clipping highlights the embeddedness of collage within a different regime of labour. Clipping bureaus relied almost exclusively on semi-skilled female labour to scan and extract ‘information’ from large amounts of printed matter. This industrial infrastructure of clipping was one of the hidden systems that helped lay the foundation for the management and commoditisation of information in the twentieth century. Post-war practices of clipping in architectural culture help bring such a system to light, crucially connecting practices of information management to the procedures used to assemble pages within emergent offset lithographic printing processes, a newly accessible reproduction technology in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Recognising this conjuncture brings to light the emergence of an ambivalent new ethos of graphic assembly that would come to dominate a range of experimental architecture practices around the globe in the 1960s, together with the transformed role that the collage-montage paradigm played during these years.

Nicola Simpson, 'Not This and Not That. Cutting A(Way) to a Tantric Buddhist Collage in the Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard'

Dom Sylvester Houédard was a Benedictine monk, artist and poet from Prinknash Abbey, known for the typestracts he made on his Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s. However, in 1967 he began a series of works he termed ‘cosmic dust poems’ or ‘laminate poems’, in which he collaged together a seemingly inexhaustible range of found materials; Vaseline, pill packets, coloured paper, foil, cut-up theological texts and newspaper articles, dust, jam, spit, leaves, petals and sand.

This paper considers form and how these modest everyday substances become carriers of meaning on equal terms with the words cut out of newspapers, books and magazines next to which they are stuck. It suggests an understanding of these poemobjects is to be gained by placing them in the counter-cultural territory in which they were made: the de-materialist philosophy found in the performances and ‘Scrudge’ of The Exploding Galaxy, the auto-destructive art of DIAS and Gustav Metzger and the psychedelic light projections of Mark Boyle. Houédard made many of these works specifically for, and included direct references to, prominent counter-cultural figures such as David Medalla, Edward Pope, Suzy Creamcheese and John Hopkins.

Alongside this interrogation of the seen, this paper then explores the unseen. Houédard’s cosmic dust poems also collage the invisible, engaging with the microcosmic, beyond the world of ordinary appearance. As such, these works could be said to exemplify the imaginative encounter between a Tantric Buddhist ontology and quantum theory. This strategy is certainly useful in contextualising Houédard’s interest in collaging the sub-atomic world, sprinkling, in his words, ‘some particles of antimatter from Gloucestershire’, alongside visible found objects.

These cosmic dust poems should not be separated from the environment in which are they read and exhibited. It was Houédard’s intention that, when a selection of these poemobjects were to be first shown at the Lisson Gallery in 1967, that they were done so alongside, ‘some extracts from the mantra “Jrim, hum, ho, ho, ho, phat”’ – a mantra composed of seed syllables recited in ritual Tantric practice to destroy all ordinary conceptual appearance. As such, it is argued, these poemobjects can be thought of as an intentional Tantric key to understanding the appearance of all other objects and the un-selving of those objects of an inherent existence.

In conclusion, this paper argues that Houédard’s interest in using invisible matter and/or the inclusion of a cut-up visible vocabulary explores collage as a transhistorical and transnational Tantric Buddhist methodology, that imputes and then dissolves the existence and meaning of form. Each cosmic dust poem is about the auto-destruction of the kataphatic cosmos; an apophatic claim of ‘not this’ and ‘not that’ for what Houédard called the ‘non-non’, the non-conceptual experience of God or the emptiness at the heart of the contemplative experience. Each work can be considered, in the words found in one cosmic laminate, ‘a little nothing poem’.

Andrew Hodgson, 'Xeroxing Surrealism: TRANSFORMAcTION and Collage as Aesthetic Continuity'

In 1947, the British Surrealists announced their dissolution following the upheavals of the Second World War, deaths of members, police raids on their printers and arrests for ‘unpatriotic activities’ (the same printers published an anarchist journal). In lieu of delegates, E.L.T. Mesens and Roland Penrose, two of the only remaining members, sent to the 1947 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris the ‘Declaration of the Surrealists in England’. Following the announcement, the British Surrealists, including European Surrealists exiled to Britain during the war who had opted to remain, returned to individual works or, often, to artistic silence. This declaration, and perhaps the ‘decentralised’ English tendency the Declaration bemoans, are perhaps strong contributors to the long-held perception that there was no British Surrealism; that there was little of a twentieth-century British avant-garde. Until recent projects of critical exhumation of its work and its histories, in established accounts of the twentieth-century avant-garde, Surrealism in Britain appears non-existent.

However, a year after the death of André Breton in 1967, these figures, that had admitted defeat 20 years before, reproclaimed the need in Britain for ‘Surrealism now!’ Beginning with the Exeter Festival of Modern Art, the surrealists in Britain reformed with the John Lyle curated and edited publication TRANSFORMAcTION, which ran from 1967–79. The first issue created during the exhibition beginning with the words: ‘It is our purpose to overthrow false gods, and we will do so, whatever label they wear, without wasting more time’.

The first issue made during the festival (yet to receive the lower case ‘c’ and thus appearing as TRANSFORMATION) consisted of a stack of A4 paper housing written and visual work generated at the festival, stapled within a blue paper cover. Both the pages inside and outside are ‘noisy’: in great departure from the slick appearance of earlier organs of Surrealism, they are photocopied. TRANSFORMAcTION, put together by Lyle, and shifting to an A5 format though maintaining the brashly coloured cover paper, the staples and the ‘noisy’ renderings of text and image within and without, continued for twelve subsequent years.

TRANSFORMAcTION is unique in its approach as a long-term project of regrounding Surrealism despite the movement’s apparent demise. Bringing together published and unpublished tracts by early surrealists, new work by survivors of that earlier iteration and work by post-war conceptual artists and writers, such as Ian Breakwell and Alan Burns, as artefacts they take on the appearance of a scrapbook. Sections of text and image, often on the same page, are each surrounded by a halo of noise generated by the photocopier on which the issues were produced. Following the events of their present day, the Vietnam War, May ‘68; Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood,’ in each issue Lyle physically collages past and then present surrealist text and image around themes responsive to each issue’s moment of production. And, as such, Lyle creates a personal project of collage, from the very corpus of Surrealism itself. Through this process of cut and paste and xerox, he reforms the history of Surrealism. Surrealist work past and present, across national languages, boundaries and borders are continually mutated, warped and reformed into aesthetically new critical spotlights; through the prism of a curatorial Lyle the corpus of Surrealism becomes itself collage, continually rehistoricised; reaestheticised.

With this paper I will build a discourse around John Lyle’s collage treatment of the corpus of Surrealism, and the aesthetic processes of cut and paste and copy he employed as an attempt to reconcile the unreal new of the post-war era with the strictly held doctrines of Surrealism’s 1930s.