Susan Hiller's remark that "collage is a form of cognition" appears in the recently published The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts 1977-2007. Hiller uses the phrase at the beginning of a talk on and around Jackson Pollock. Her own sense of the phrase is evident in her description of From the Freud Museum (1991-97):
My starting points were artless, worthless artefacts and materials - rubbish, discards, fragments, souvenirs and reproductions - which seemed to carry an aura of memory and to hint they might mean something, something that made me want to work with them and on them. I've stumbled across or gone in quest of objects, I've orchestrated relationships through the use of museum devices like captions and labels, and I've invented or discovered fluid taxonomies. Archaeological collecting boxes play an important role in the installation as containers or frames appropriate to the processes of excavating, salvaging, sorting, naming and preserving, which are as intrinsic to art as to psychoanalysis and archaeology. (69)
I began gathering quotations to unfold the shock of recognition this phrase prompted in me. Some of the quotations do not detail collage specifically. Instead I present a form of intellectual engagement that is variously a way to avoid using the hands, a spatial vortex, a brand of cocoa powder in traditional Dutch dress, and an Arcimboldian encrustation. Read on.
(1)Last week you sent me an email from Biella about giving your Loose Associations Lecture for the first time, and wrote that the audience enjoyed your 'crap connections.' I wondered why 'crap' was exactly the right word, and it's because 'crap' is itself a crap kind of word: weak, lame, pathetic, shrugging, flippant.'Bad' would be too specific, and 'shit' too harsh. Isn't that level of precision beautiful? ...complete, full circle.. and entirely accessible, which is curiously opposite to your work.
(2)Let's talk about editing... I was cutting things together based on color, painterly values, textures. But one of the things that I was interested in was difference - I was interested in how far I could go to have things not match up but have them still fit together...
So I started by matching not texture exactly but contrasting color and shape: a circle to a circle, in a totally different space. It became this vortex...
As a teenager I had this sense that things could link in space on multidimensions, and I would think about that in terms of relationships, whether it was people relationships or abstract-idea relationships, that they could link in all three dimensions, plus of course time....
Jess, Goddess Because Is Is Falling Asleep, 1954. Currently part of the touring exhibition and publication: Jess: To and From the Printed Page.
(3)...my secret vice is "making collages by Joseph Cornell." I have a rubber stamp that says "Collage by Joseph Cornell," and I use it with the same Yiddish dictionary that I found in an old loft. I cut out blocks of information in Yiddish, glue them down, and then stamp them "Collage by Joseph Cornell," and I either give them away or mail them off or sell them or do whatever I do with them....
(4)For a time (prior to 1978) I tended to use the term collage loosely and generally to refer to all art works created or assembled out of diverse materials - works of art emphasizing contiguity, contingency, juxtaposition, realignment, relationship, unlikely pairings, etc.
The problem with the term, as I saw when I became more precise, is that it suggests (or can suggest) an unmotivated or un-necessitated groupings of materials. Things in a collage are like letters of the alphabet - when you put some of them together they will always appear to be seeking meaning, or even to be making it.
(5) The thing that makes the collages work is that I don't cut anything, I just use whole sheets. Like a whole newspaper or just a page, and I put it down over some posters or something.
What I'm really trying to do is use things that I don't want to throw away; things that are just floating. It's my way of saving things and using things that I've made in other ways and trying to keep them from becoming trash. Also, when I'm making the collages flat I can't really see them while I'm making them...
The purpose is meant to just take all these things and just smash them together into a time capsule and just glue them down. I try not to use anything with any meaning. For example, I would never use anything from the day Martin Luther King was killed or something. I just use things that are floating around but not things that are personal to me. I would use things that I find well made or well designed. I don't feel like I made them. In a way I don't feel any ownership over these, I don't feel personally responsible for them.
(6)
(7)So then, what is [ENTER NAME OF YOUR NEW BOOK OR FILM HERE]? Perhaps, for a start, I will say that it represents "structure." It consists of a certain conditional unity of fractions, which are dispersed and networked through either magnetic fields, movements in the air, or the voracity of our eyes...
Looking back . . . let's say their architecture (associations, relativity, construction of intonations) began to shape only in the process of writing...
Okay, right, yeah, so I now have, what, erm, thirty, yes, thirty seconds to pull all this together. Okay. That's not so bad. That's great, actually. It's, erm, just looking back through my notes here, well, it's, what, a spatial process, as Arcimboldo liked to say, translating one form into another, no that's not right. Dust, exactly, yes, loose encrustations. Nineteen... eighteen...
That's not right at all. But even if you have a bad idea you can rubber stamp it with the name of another artist, and that, surely, is creative freedom, yeah. That must be my time about up. Isn't it? Yes? Thirty seconds isn't long - ten - nine- eight - when it's a topic like this, er, wow, if I was talking about cocoa powder and Dutch traditional dress, well, then, yeah, but, I might as well be back in 1978 or - three - two - erm, architecture.
SOURCES
(1) Ryan Gander, "Zero, Lectures, Pushing, Vibration, Feedback etc." in Appendix (Artimo, 2003), 122. He continues:
One step removed from that, the Dutch call this idea - one picture inside another; the Russian Dolls visual feedback thing - The Droste or The Manchurian Candidate, but even more so because the device is used on the front of Droste brand cocoa powder boxes, where a girl in traditional Dutch dress holds the same package with the picture of herself holding the same package, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...
(2) Abigail Child, "Time Corners Interview: With Charles Bernstein" in This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film (University of Alabama Press, 2005), 175-6.
(3) Henry Martin, "Should an Eyelash Last Forever: An Interview with Ray Johnson" in Ray Johnson: Correspondences (Wexner Center for the Arts and Flammarion, 1999), 192.
(4) Lyn Hejinian, "Commments for Manuel Brito" in The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000),190-191.
(5) Josh Smith, Hidden Darts/Hidden Darts Reader, ed. Achim Horchdörfer (Verlag der Bunchandlung Walther König, Köln, 2008).
(6) Falke Pissano, (FROM TOP:) OBJECT AND DISINTEGRATION: THE OBJECT OF THREE (THE CONSTRUCTING ARTIST), 2008; OBJECT AND DISINTEGRATION: THE OBJECT OF THREE, 2008, INSTALLATION CONSISTING OF SCULPTURE AND THREE PROJECTIONS.INSTALLATION VIEW AT BALICE HERTLING, PARIS, JAN 2008; AFFECTING ABSTRACTION NUMBER 3 (THE COMPLEX OBJECT), 2007, PERFORMANCE/DVD, 23 MIN; OBJECT AND DISINTEGRATION: THE OBJECT OF THREE (THE ENGAGING SPECTATOR), 2008; CHILLIDA (FORMS AND FEELINGS), 2006, 2 DVDS, 14 MIN. Images courtesy Hollybush Gardens.
(7) Shushan Avagyan: Interview with Arkadii Dragomoschenko on his book Dust (Dalkey Archive Press, Illinois, 2009), in CONTEXT no.22. Available online here.
