Collage

Abstract

The dissonant effect of placing incongruous elements side by side, explored in the previous chapter, can be regarded as a verbal form of the visual technique of collage. Literally ‘gluing’, collage became a widespread and highly influential technique far beyond its origins in cubism and in visual art. Collage can be identified as a compositional factor in a great deal of modernist and postmodernist artistic activity, including sculpture, film, and music. It can also be understood as a fundamental compositional technique in surrealist writing. This will be explored in this chapter. Throughout this book, I have repeatedly noted lines of surrealist thinking in which the surrealist method, the surrealist intention, and the surrealist image have been the key notions, and the particular mode of expression secondary to this overarching frame. This is absolutely not to neglect the specific form of articulation – which of course is essential and central to this book on the language of surrealism – but the notion that the surrealist image underlies all surrealist activity and output allows for ready connections and continuities to be made across different artistic forms. With respect to collage, Sweet (2003), for example, makes the case for correlations between surrealist poetry and the visual collage technique.