Juhani Pallasmaa, The World is a Collage, 2014 (Spring semester 2019-20)

Collage and montage are quintessential techniques in modern and contemporary art

and filmmaking. Collage combines pictorial motifs and fragments from disconnected

origins into a new synthetic entity which casts new roles and meanings to the parts. It

suggests new narratives, dialogues, juxtapositions and temporal durations. Its elements lead double-lives; the collaged ingredients are suspended between their originary essences and the new roles assigned to them by the poetic ensemble.

The techniques of collage and assemblage are conventionally related to

visual arts and cinema, but Joseph Brodsky, the poet, makes the remark: “It was

poetry that invented the technique of montage, not Eisenstein”.1 However, every

artistic work, be it literary, musical or visual, is bound to be a juxtaposition of

images, emotions and ambiences in order to construct an articulated and engaging

spatio-temporal experience. Whether the work qualifies as a collage depends

on the degree of the apparent “givenness” of its ingredients. We tend to think that

our awareness is a coherent and continuous mental state. In fact, human consciousness keeps shifting from one percept and thought to the next, from actuality to dream, association to deduction, and from recollection to imagination. Our very

consciousness is an ever-changing collage of mental fragments held together by one’s

sense of self.

In its inherent permanence and penetrating, preconceived order, the art

form of architecture is conventionally not associated with the notion of collage. Yet,

the very role of architecture as frames and settings for human activities turns it into a

varying and variously completed entity, an ever-changing collage of activities, furnishings and objects. Because of their longevity, buildings tend to change their functions and be altered as material entities. Most of our historical buildings are assemblies of alterations, materials, textures and colours layered through decades or centuries of use.

Often it is this very temporal layering that gives a building its unique atmosphere and

charm; the geometric spatial and material configuration of architecture is embraced

and enhanced by use, erosion and time; architecture turns from a spatial abstraction

into a lived situation, ambience and metaphor.

The idea of collage has also been a conscious and deliberate artistic method

in architecture from Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Te in Mantua to Le Corbusier’s and

Alvar Aalto’s fusions of modernist and vernacular images in their architectural assemblages, all the way to Jean Nouvel’s collaged walls of the Belfort Theatre and David Chipperfield’s renovation of Neues Museum in Berlin. Also, many of Frank Gehry’s works are collages although even the parts are deliberately designed by the architect; nevertheless, his buildings appear as assemblages of pre-existing units suggestive of differing origins.

Contemporary buildings, such as art museums, often appear strained and

severe in their relentless formal logic, whereas the same activities located in recycled

buildings – frequently of former industrial use – project a more relaxed and welcoming

atmosphere due to their more complex logic, confl icting architectural themes and richer materiality; indeed, their collage-character. Peter Brook, the radical theatre

director, deliberately demolished his avant-garde theatre building Bouffes du Nord in

Paris in order to create an associative and emotionally responsive space for theatrical

performances. “A good space can’t be neutral, for an impersonal sterility gives no food

to the imagination. The Bouffes has the magic and poetry of a ruin, and anyone who

allowed themselves to be invaded by the atmosphere of a ruin knows strongly how the

imagination is let loose”, Brook argues.

All collages tend to have a similar capacity to stimulate our imagination,

as if the various fragments, torn from their initial settings, would beg the viewer to

give them back their lost identity. The superbly executed collages by the Czech poet

and artist Jiři Kolař are suspended between a literary and visual expression, and one

can almost hear words being whispered by the visual imagery. Leonardo advised artists to stare at a crumbling wall in order to enter the mental state of inspiration,3 and the collage takes similar advantage of the intricacies of our perceptual, imaginative and empathetic processes.

Notes

1 Joseph Brodsky, “Wooing the Inanimate”, On Grief and Reason, Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, New York, 1995, 343.

2 Andrew Todd and Jean-Guy Lecat, The Open Circle: Peter Brook’s Theatre

Environments, Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2003, 25.

3 “When you look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones, if you

have to devise some scene you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes . . .or, again, you may see battles and figures in action, or strange faces and costumes, or an endless variety of objects, which you could reduce to complete and well-drawn

forms. And these appear on such walls promiscuously, like the sound of bells in

whose jangle you may find any name or word you choose to imagine.”

As quoted in Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New – Art and the

Century of Change, Thames and Hudson, London, 1980, 225.