Rona Cran

interbred and intertwined: collage, montage, and the trouble with terminology

A response to Tomasz Stompors review of Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature,

and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank OHara and Bob Dylan
(Ashgate, 2014)
Rona Cran
The act of reading, Mark Ford suggests in the Preface to his recent book of essays,
can often feel like a dialogue of one. The writer is not there, but all the readers experiences
and expectations and tastes and sense of identity are in dialogue with the authors written
words.1 Reading Tomasz Stompors response to my own recently published book on collage,
in which he highlights the differences in terminology across nationally formed discourses,
this notion came to mind. For Stompor, the term collage is inadequate as an umbrella term
applied in the visual arts, literature, and in music. Instead, he attempts to use his review as a
soapbox for making a strong case for a different terminology centred around the term
montage. For me, of course, having written a book on the subject, the use of the term collage
as a broad, inclusive term forms part of my central thesis, and includes montage but as a
subsidiary process. In response to Stompors review, I want to first briefly consider the
relationship between terminology and collage (and, indeed, montage and assemblage) in the
twentieth-century, before standing on my own soap box with regard to collage, and then
addressing the difficulties inherent in Stompors piece as a whole.
The invention of collage as we know it today is attributed to Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque, but the poet Guillaume Apollinaire came up with its (admittedly rather
prosaic) name, which derives from the French word coller, meaning to paste. From its
inception in the twentieth century, then, collage evolved as a plastic process with strong
poetic associations, an expansive alliance which, in and of itself, asserts its non-exclusivity.
As the diversity of collage works from Picassos Still Life with Chair Caning to Ezra Pounds
Cantos to The Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band indicates, collage was
embraced, broadened in scope, and adapted by a range of artists, writers, and musicians,
whose work helped to dismantle the barriers between their disciplines. Louis Aragons view,

Mark Ford, This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray (London: Eyewear
Publishing, 2014), 8.

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which I share, was that collage was called collage only for purposes of simplicity.2 In other
words (given that it so readily spans the disciplines as both a practice and a concept), as a
literary-artistic practice it far exceeded the limited terms with which it could be defined. For
Picasso and Braque, as for the collagists who would follow them throughout the twentieth
century, the role of collage was to attempt to embody life, rather than just to document it.
Their use of collage was not so much an invention as a repurposing of an ancient practice,
born out of a need or desire to respond, aesthetically, to their social, political, spatial, and
creative contexts.
Dictionary definitions perpetuate expectations that collage is strictly flat, onedimensional, and limited to the realm of plastic art: invariably these definitions specify the
act of gluing or pasting, but allude to little else. The reality, of course, is quite different
collage is about an intellectual and emotional relationship with a given aesthetic environment,
and involves the experimentation with and the linking of disparate phenomena:
democratically, arbitrarily, and even unintentionally. However, this act of naming a literaryartistic practice for purposes of simplicity led, as Stompors essay (as well as the intercritical wranglings of nearly a century) illustrates, to a great confusion in terminology
though not, perhaps, quite to the extent of pervading most critical discourses on modernist
art, as Stompor suggests.
Stompor observes, correctly, that throughout the twentieth century words including
collage, montage, photomontage, and assemblage are often used almost
interchangeably. Is a collage also a montage? What is a piece of art that incorporates both
assemblage and collage? What is the difference between a photomontage and a montage?
Why did William C. Seitz curate an exhibition made up predominantly of collages and call it
The Art of Assemblage (1961)?3 Even in the context of Stompors montage polemic and my
own work on collage, the terms used to describe these supposedly different processes are
often indistinguishable. For instance, Stompor argues that montage-based techniques can be

Louis Aragon, La peinture au dfi (preface to a catalogue for an exhibition of collages at the Galerie
Goemans in Paris, March 1930), in Les Collages (Paris: Hermann, 1965 (1980)), n.p.
3
Jed Perl, writing about collage or assembly in New Art City: Manhattan at Midcentury (New York: Random
House, 2005), observes that: To define the limits of collage was almost to violate it. Collage was high art. It
was also popular art. It could be two-dimensional. It could also be three-dimensional, as Picasso had first
demonstrated [] Collage, indeed, was too restrictive a term to define such a sprawling subject. A more
expansive term might be that which the Museum of Modern Art took as the title for its 1961 survey of these
developments, The Art of Assemblage. (285-6)
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characterised by a three-step process of selection, fragmentation, and recombination, a
description which could just as easily be used to describe the collage technique. Similarly, he
describes George Grosz and John Heartfield as monteurs, where I would simply call them
collagists. I dont believe that either of us is wrong. Stompor regrets that no clear distinction
between the two [collage and montage] has been elaborated so far though Ulmer,
Bernstein, Perloff, Poggi, and Taylor, among others, all attempt to make distinctions, or else
explain why they feel no distinction is needed. Charles Bernstein, for instance, views
montage (specifically in the case of the work of Ezra Pound) as the use of contrasting images
toward the goal of one unifying theme and collage as the use of different textual elements
without recourse to an overall unifying idea.4 Critic Jean-Jacques Thomas points out that
one cannot fail to note [] how interbred and intertwined collage and montage are,5 whilst
Tom Conley suggests, and I agree, that it may actually be useful to confuse montage with
collage montage is an essence of cinema [] yet we see how collage already dissolves
the order of montage within single shots.6 For Marjorie Perloff, too, it can also be argued
that collage and montage are two sides of the same coin, in view of the fact that the artistic
process involved is really the same. Like Perloff, my own view is that collage is really the
master term, montage techniques being an offshoot of early collage practice.7 It is possible to
draw out distinctions between the two terms, but these will always be subjective. For me,
montage is a process whereby images which a filmmaker or photographer has often created
themselves are assembled (usually for the first time), in order to form a narrative. Film, in
which montage originated, is primarily about telling stories. Collage, conversely, is a process
whereby existing images or texts are cut apart and reassembled into new works with
shocking or telling juxtapositions,8 and without, as noted above, recourse to an overall
unifying idea. In collage the fragmented elements used usually meet unexpectedly, whereas
in montage their meeting is usually pre-planned. Montage prizes seamlessness and created
images whereas collage operates using detritus, fragmentation, and the re-use of existing
components in new contexts. That Stompor prefers montage to collage is embodied in his

Charles Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Jean-Jacques Thomas, Collage/Space/Montage, in Collage, ed. Jeanine Parisier-Plottel, 82.
6
Tom Conley, Vigo van Gogh, in Collage, ed. Jeanine Parisier-Plottel, 165.
7
Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-garde, Avant Guerre and the Language of Rupture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 246.
8
David Banash, Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption (New York: Rodopi,
2013), 25-6.
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desire for more parallels between my four subjects, and his view that the fragments within a
collage should always communicate clearly.
However, it seems counterintuitive to quibble over terminology when what collage
(and its closely-related but subsidiary practices montage, assemblage etc.) produced was, to
borrow from David Banash, a dialogic mass of voices stemming from the conviction that
no single point-of-view could truly capture reality.9 Alfred Leslie asserted that his 1964
film, The Last Clean Shirt, should provoke the question: What the fuck is going on?
because, to most people, reality is nothing more than a confirmation of their expectations.10
Collage often provokes, on the part of the viewer, reader or listener, precisely Leslies
question. This, of course, is its fundamental appeal: in and of itself, it subverts expectations
and alters our perception of reality. I show throughout my book that the tendency to
circumscribe the art of collage within the limited sphere of literal cut-and-paste, as Stompor
does, is misleading. Collage is a practice which demands a multiplicity of approaches: to
delineate it stringently as either one thing or another is to severely limit our understanding of
the work of the artists, writers, and musicians who came to use it in non-traditional ways.
Conversely, a view of collage that is as open and adaptable as the collage practice itself
enables the reader or viewer not only to appreciate the multiple ways in which it operates as
an art form, but to also insert into its history individuals who might not otherwise have taken
up their place there like, in this case, Frank OHara and Bob Dylan.
Stompors proposition that the term montage replace the term collage is impassioned
but rather opaque even by the end of his essay there is little evidence (other than his own
strongly-held views) that montage is in any way the superior term. His main argument seems
to be that montage makes explicit certain key connotations relating to politics, industry, mass
media, and mechanisation. Possibly there are industrial or technological connotations
associated with the word montage in the German language, but in English these are relatively
minor and, at least, are equally present in the connotations surrounding the term collage.
The origins of the practice of montage lie in 1920s Russian film, and thus give the term its
filmic associations. Similarly, collage originated in plastic art, and thus it retains, in turn, its
artistic connotations. However, the concept of collage (by which I mean the reasons why it
was used from 1912 onwards and why it gained such momentum as a literary-artistic
9

David Banash, Collage Culture, 87-9.

Quoted in Daniel Kane, We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry
(Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2009), 96.
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practice) is very much rooted in politics, industry, mass media, and mechanisation, a fact I
make clear throughout my book.11 From Picasso and Braques papiers-colls, which
stemmed from the combination of a desire to explore new methods of representation and a
pervasive unease about the growing political instability in Europe, to the highly politicised
work of the Berlin Dadaists and beyond, collage was both politically charged and intrinsically
linked to the world of mass production. Stompors indication that Cubism (in which collage
originated) was somehow at a remove from such factors as advertising, print media, and a
general transformation of the public space factors which nevertheless influenced other
artistic movements is ill-advised. Cubism hardly happened in a vacuum. This suggestion
also contradicts Stompors assertion that all branches of artistic production were influenced
by the standardization and serialization of industrial production. Collage originated as and
remained a response to mass production, mass media, and the transformation of public space,
whilst montage (a technique developed using the technological inventions of film and
photography) was arguably initially, at least rather a by-product of industry and
mechanisation. It is simply incorrect to claim, as Stompor does, that montage somehow had a
monopoly over cheap, ubiquitously available graphic material or, indeed, that the use of
the term collage [] clouds and distorts what Stompor calls this historical fact. It is also
disingenuous to suggest that the montages of George Grosz and John Heartfield had nothing
whatsoever to do with the collages created by Picasso and Braque a few years earlier. That
montage became a powerfully subversive political tool, used extensively by the Dadaists in
particular, is not in dispute, but this evolution in the practice was due, in large part, to Picasso
and Braques developments and provocations as they sought to express the growing sense of
unease and displacement that began to pervade Europe in the years prior to the First World
War. Furthermore, collage is fundamentally about relationships about bringing objects or
ideas into contact with one another and it is unlikely that Grosz and Heartfield would have
refuted this by denying any connection between their work and that of the Cubists.
This relativity not to mention the subjectivity and impressionism that collage
permits was key to my selection of Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank OHara, and
Bob Dylan as my subjects. Far from being what Stompor regards as a motley crew or even a
jumbled constellation, these four are, rather, embodiments of Pierre Joriss key assertion

David Banashs 2013 book, Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption,
demonstrates that the origins of collage are found in assembly line technologies and mass media forms of layout
and advertising in early twentieth-century newspapers.
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that there isnt a 20th century art that was not touched, rethought or merely revamped by the
use of [collage].12 They are deliberately unrelated. Stompor criticises my apparent failure to
ensure that my subjects properly communicate, but in doing so misses the point of my
selection. Far from being an artistic ambition, my decision to focus on four very different
individuals was in fact a scholarly choice designed to highlight the hugely diverse and
individual ways in which collage was used during the twentieth century, particularly by
individuals not traditionally associated with the practice.13 It is important, in the context of
the book, that these differences are explicit. I am, of course, aware that there are common
occurrences of Rimbaud in the work of Burroughs and OHara, as Stompor points out, but
there are common occurrences of Rimbaud in the work of a lot of people (not least Bob
Dylan), and one doesnt necessarily forge connections between them, unless occurrences of
Rimbaud is the focus of the study in question. Whilst I am demonstrably in favour of forging
connections between artists or genres or mediums, I felt (and I make this clear in the
introduction to my book) that to labour what are really little more than anecdotal links simply
for the sake of the fantasy of a single, impossible totality reduced to one particular14 would
have been counterproductive and to the detriment of my study of collage. As I note in my
introduction, to labour these connections (or, indeed, missed connections) too much would
only be distracting. Art exists in creating new patterns, and so too, arguably, does criticism.
The advent of collage in the twentieth century brought about the deconstruction of old
barriers between language and art, with the use of pasted letters in paintings giving rise to
poetic associations which mere spots of colour [could] not evoke,15 to quote the French
writer and art collector Christian Zervos. This in turn brought about the dissolution of
perceived impediments between art and life, demanding that the viewer, reader, or listener
increasingly play their own role in the landscape of a work of art or literature, simultaneously
experiencing what Daniel Kane calls the provocative joys of juxtaposition and
mysteriousness, whilst also contemplating what it is that constitutes authority, identity,
voice, originality, sincerity, and art.16 Stompor laments the problem of a universal
Joris, Collage and Post-Collage: In Honour of Eric Mottram, (1997) in A Nomad Poetics (Connecticut:
Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 86.
13
In my introduction, I observe that my book is a self-reflexive exercise, embodying the collage form it
discusses. Stompor takes umbrage with this, implying that my so-called artistic ambitions somehow stand in
the way of a constructive scholarly debate.
14
Banash, Collage Culture, 48.
15
Quoted in Herta Wescher, Collage, trans. Robert E. Wolf (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1978), 21.
16
Daniel Kane, What is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde (New York: Teachers & Writers
Collaborative, 2003), 12.
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conception of collage (yet seems content to advocate for a universal conception of montage).
In doing so, he fails to recognise that collage is not, in fact, universal but, rather, that it
brings about limitless unexpected creative and critical encounters. As such, the field of
collage, in which montage and assemblage function as subsidiary practices, remains fertile,
productively contentious, and constantly evolving. Collage was fundamental to modernism
and its corollaries, transforming the ways in which literature was written and art and music
was made. It remains an enduringly vital practice, the many applications and possibilities of
which are being persistently reassessed, reimagined, and renewed, and continually pushed in
new and fascinating directions.