|
February 09, 2007
An example of décollage, where an image is created by cutting, tearing away or otherwise removing, pieces of an original image. In this case it is a poster:
Francois Dufrene, Fleur à gaz, 1965
The posters Dufrêne utilized were found objects, like Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades —banal & anonymous. He was a member of the Lettrism movement. This Parisian movement, which began in the 1940s, focused on the visual dimensions of language. It was based on the concept that conventional language failed to adequately transmit individual energies and desires and should be replaced by “fluctuating letters” disentangled from their usual meanings and contexts, enabling them to retain “suggestions” and “fleeting evocations.
Update: 13 February
According to Jennifer Farrell in her The Effacement of Myth: A Study of the Work of Roland Barthes, Isidore Isou, François Dufrêne and Daniel Buren Lettrism, was also known as hypergraphie, and super-écriture, was a movement based on the plastic use of the letter or sign which was not to signify anything other than itself, thus transcending traditional conventions of meaning by emphasizing the figure or form of the sign of the letter over representation. Farrell says:
The work of the décollage artist and lettriste poet François Dufrêne reflected a similar conception of language as object in his search for a neutral or “colorless” form of language. Dufrêne, however, did not approach his investigation solely as a theoretician, but rather as an artist and a poet who utilized the very forms he deconstructed to structure his art. Central to his visual work was the removal, or the literal effacing of “language,” namely, the texts of the found posters that were the basis for his visual work. The removal and separation of text from meaning in his visual work was paralleled by the aural investigations of his poetry, which explored the liberation of language through the reinterpretation of literary devices, such as alliteration, crirythmes, and other such methods, to ultimately lead to the construction of “a purely phonetic language that would eliminate all semiotic and semantic conventions"... Through the process of extinguishing language, Dufrêne had sought to reinvigorate and reinvent it and to expand the role of the artist beyond art and language to society itself.
The Dufrene image can be contrasted with Picasso's cubism:
Picasso, Still life with Chair Caning,1911/12. Collage of oil, oilcloth, and pasted paper simulating chair caning on canvas.
As Farrell comments collage by the 1950s was no longer a revolutionary form. Collage had become a recycled avant-garde strategy that had long since ceased to be oppositional. However, there was still radical potential in using something from the street, something found in daily life such as the debased fragments of commercial culture that the décollagists used.
|
I like this art form at present.. I think I will try one...It does seems a very violent thing to me and have decided to paste roughly torn out violent newspaper headlines...should be interesting.