Collage Talks
with Magda Dragu
Associate lecturer at CESI for courses on (neo)avant-garde and conceptual art, various forms of artistic hybridization (music-literature-visual arts) and disruptive forms in contemporary arts, Magda Dragu, PhD in Comparative Literature from Indiana University, Bloomington, recently edited Subversion and Conformity of Literary Collage. Between Cut and Glue (2024) and published Form and Meaning in Avant-Garde Collage and Montage (2020) with Routledge/Taylor and Francis.
Collage as Academic and Popular Art
The birth of collage in the cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque was a key moment for twentieth and twenty-first centuries art. Taken over by almost all early avant-garde movements and becoming a key artistic technique for Pop Art of the mid-late twentieth century, collage has had a history that precedes the early avant-garde, in Europe, Asia, or the Unites States. Juggling permamently between the “cut” and the “glue,” collage is a complex technique, that conflicts and confuses sense and perception alike.
However, professional and popular artists seem to use collage differently. While for artists such as Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, or László Moholy-Nagy collage is used as an experimental technique that leads to other innovative and original techinques, popular collage artists practice collage within the limits of the collage alone. By comparing and analyzing works from both types of classes, further distinctions and continuites emerge. Collage is here to stay.
The Collage Talks will take place at the Green Hours (GDS groundfloor gallery), starting 5 p.m.
