Cut & Paste
Walk With Me, 2020
Collage may be one of the most underpoliticized aesthetic approaches. This might be the case for the way people often associate it with children. Cutting up old magazines, spreading some Elmer's on a poster board, and arranging some pieces is how I was introduced to the practice likely in the single-digit era of life. But Sasha Bonét puts the edge back in collage while writing in The Paris Review about artist Lorna Simpson's work. Bonét pivots to the end of her piece like this, after terraining through a meditation on Breonna Taylor's last public writing, Ahmaud Arbery's murder, and Black futures:
Americas were built on oppression, and a new order must be conceptualized. Reform is simply not enough. We must start from scratch, cutting up the past and then piecing together the imagined with what worked for those before us. We must start with how we see ourselves. We can liberate through loving one another. The imagination of artists has always been necessary in willing us toward an implausible existence. So when I put my ancestors in the sky, I’m manifesting our ascendence. May we never return to the way things were.
Did you catch that? Cutting up the past and then piecing it together.
Construction, 2020
Simpson herself, the first African American woman to have a solo exhibit at the MoMA, talks about collaging like this:
Collaging is a historical practice of Black imagination. It has helped us to envision unfathomable futures in the face of violence and uncertainty. It has been a creative way to love each other even though we haven’t been shown care, to express the depths of our experiences even when no one ever asked how we felt, to give evidence to all the things unseen.
The notion of fragmentation, especially of the body, is prevalent in our culture, and it’s reflected in my works. We’re fragmented not only in terms of how society regulates our bodies but in the way we think about ourselves.
Simpson says her collages are "kind of my subconscious" and that they're done quickly through free association. But that description doesn't seem to catch the sharp political edge to her work, like what she does with Black women's hair. Or maybe what happens in her subconscious, and what kind of associations she freely makes are just more monumental than mine. Most likely.
Lyra Night Sky Styled in NYC, 2020
You can see the rest of her collage exhibit, Give Me Some Moments, over at Hauser & Wirth. And all of her moving work --paintings, sculptures, etc. -- inspires on her site.
Visions Collage is another collage artist but with close connections to DJ and funk music scenes. He takes a mostly analogue approach to collage - not even knowing how to use photoshop, but instead draws inspiration from record covers mostly between 1968 and 1975.
Not surprisingly, he has done album covers for indestructible funk outfit Jungle Fire. Flea Market Funk did a recent profile of VC with some of his work. There's much more over on his nicely curated Instragram page.
Status Board
Reading: Picked up a .99 cent copy of Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, which I've been wanting to read for a long time. But, I fear the August rush will keep me from finishing, so I'm about to abort 70 pages in with intention to pick it back up later.
Writing: Return to an abandoned but never lost academic piece that dates back to at least last October. I know this time stamp because I said something about the piece in the first edition of this newsletter (big sigh), which might illustrate something about how poorly conceived of a piece it really was at the time, my commitment to finding it a home, or -- probably -- both.
Listening: Roses in the Dark by Cleo Sol. Not much you can say about this sound, voice, and writing but press play and clear your day.