Writer Sean Casey talks up collage as form and where to find some for yourself.–TM
Folks in proximity to Earth would be well advised to make a stop over in Salem, Massachusetts sometime before August 19th. That’s the date the Peabody Essex Museum’s Joseph Cornell exhibition closes. There, an enormous selection of Cornell’s gorgeous collage, box sculpture, and film are on display.
Untitled (Tilly Losch), 1935-38, Joseph Cornell
An interactive overview of the exhibition and Cornell is available here.
The Peabody’s Cornell exhibition harmonized with a couple museum trips in my recent past. Most recently, Hampshire College’s exhibit of Keith Waldrop’s collage, The Second Hand. While no longer up, Waldrop’s collage can often be found on covers of books published by Burning Deck, the press he runs with Rosmarie Waldrop.
Collage is also on display in Keith Waldrop’s writing, for which he is more well known. His most recent book, The Real Subject, if not a collage of found text, is one of forms, incorporating fragments of narrative and poetry.
Fans of Waldrop and Cornell might already know of Sergei Parajanov, the avant garde filmmaker whose films include The Color of Pomegranates and The Legend of Suram Fortress. Where Cornell wanted nothing to do with a camera and simply worked with existing footage, Parajanov incorporates collage into his narrative films–to the extent the work often moves like a sequence of collage.
The Parajanov Museum in Yerevan, Armenia gives due attention to Parajanov’s marvelous visual art–collage, assemblage, and costume–work that is, unfortunately, exhibited rarely in North America.
Elections At The Marionettes, 1984