Collaging as Existential Expression
"Man, that's dark!" I said, my eyes struggling to capture the depth of images, layers of misery. "Ye," Sanya agreed and flipped the collage to take another look at it. "She is going through dark and difficult times."
This friend, the one who made that collage, struggles to express her feelings in words. She is like me. We'd rather speak in abstractions than communicate what beats in our flesh, the aches in our legs.
But that collage spoke for her. A single small window in a dark bedroom, framed by oppressive words, covered in gloom. The collage spoke. Maybe it screamed.
The vision of a post-modern "light at the end of the tunnel" where light never truly arrives. Hope recedes forever.
That collage awakened us to our friend's situation. The collage not only spoke about her life to her, but to us as well. We made a conscious decision to regularly meet up with her and invite her over.
Collages come out of the "left field," like a pleasant surprise or a car crash. Dreaming is the closest experience to collaging. Hence why collages can reveal our nightmares as well. They are unpredictable.
Free-association of veiled fragments striving to compose a meaningful whole.
Philosopher head over philosopher head. Sartre stacked on Foucault, Socrates's massive head sneaking out from behind, bearded Marx shadowing over Kant's sunken cheeks. A collage of philosopher heads. Endless barrage of philosopher heads.
I don't know when and from where it arrived, but there sat a "History of Philosophy" book in Sanya's pile of collage material. Tons of pictures in it, mostly busts, drawings, and photos of philosophers' head. Something beckoned to me in those glossy, magazine-like pages covered with philosophers' heads - my one and only finished collage...
Wasn't the most pleasant of times. In the midst of foggy Covid months, stuck at home, life flattened out, my grad school dreams crushed, I despised philosophy. I resented it.
Supposed to enjoy my two years of grad school with peers and professors, thinking, talking, reading, and writing, but no! I saw my peers merely on Zoom screens. Seminars lifeless like road-kill, conversations without meaning, my grad years seemed to waste away into nothing. A dirty, meaningless nothing. Dark times.
Resentful, pissed, mired in self-pity, I hated philosophy. I hated what I did. I hated seminars. I even stopped participating much.
That's when the book beckoned to me.
So, I took a stab at it.
Like a good philosopher, first I read the picture-book, sucking out the knowledge of words. Then I cut every single head out of the book. I decapitated all the philosophers in history. Alas, all the ones who made it into the book.
I spilled philosophical blood. The table I collaged on reminded me of paintings from the French Revolution. Head after head fallen on to cobblestone, and Paris glistening blood-red in cries of terror and revolutionary joy.
Then, I realized there were no decapitated female philosophers in my deck of heads. There were a few women in the book, but without even noticing I left them whole, their heads still standing on their shoulders.
At the end, this is what the collage looked like:
The beauty of collaging, and its transformative power, comes from the unpredictability of the finished image. I cut out heads, not knowing how and where they would end up. Who knew (definitely not me) that this collage would express my deepest struggle with philosophy.
I saw myself in that collage. That head, filled with words from the index of the same book, was my head. Piled up to the brim with words, referencing dead philosophers, surrounded by other men who loved words and arguing, - that was my head.
Philosophy is beautiful, don't get me wrong. But it also allows a very specific type of person (me for example or my anonymous friend) to flee the concreteness of the world into abstraction, into a kind of thinking that empties out the world of its flesh where accuracy and correctness takes precedence over feelings and worldly wisdom.
Although I came to philosophy through an existential crisis and primarily understood philosophy as a way to live better, I had become a man of abstraction. Maybe out of my peers I was still the one who loved the colours of the world the most, but it didn't matter. Every person's shadow incomparably belongs to him.
Collaging begins with browsing. Flipping through colourful pages, some images beckon more than others.
They whisper, "cut me out. You need me."
Without knowing exactly why, you cut them out and place them in your pile. You browse and gather as if you're picking the ripest fruit in an orchard. Not knowing why this image is riper than the other.
When drawing, you might have a developed idea of the final image. But with collaging, you're clueless. You take what the world gives you, and some images spontaneously call on you. There is an openness of not knowing where you're heading. Yet, already in the process of gathering, these fragments begin to tell a story of which you are not the sole author, a story whose ending hides in twilight.
You participate in the making of a collage without directing or dictating the outcome. A spontaneous process. A process in which you proceed.
Then comes composing, or what I like to call: placing.
Place is not the same as space. A space reminds me of an empty condo or an empty store with a "for lease" sign hanging, bare and lifeless. A place is living-space, inhabited by people, decorated with meaningful furniture. When you look at a space, it's barren and empty. Whereas a place already speaks of the people who live in it, work in it, enjoy or suffer in it. It shows a life lived.
As images are placed together, these unrelated fragments grow into a narrative - the narrative of one's current situation.
They express a story. They gather a place for life to see itself in its own expression.
But still, the collage is incomplete. Like moving into a new place and shifting the furniture after living in for a while, the collage shifts to find its natural flow. Placement is also re-placement. So don't glue too quickly.
And when the collage is complete, glued in place, you see a whole through the gathered fragments. Images turn into a vision: a vision of how life has been, where it's going, what you have been feeling. And over time, it keeps speaking to you, releasing new meanings out of the vision.
In my collage: a vision of terror, of resentment, of what I have become yet what I don't want to be.
For my friend: a vision of receding hope, a never-coming salvation.
And sometimes, a collage is simply humorous. Need not be so dark and heavy.
Yet, you don't really get to choose that. You have to surrender and allow the collage to speak on your behalf. If you force it to look a certain way, the whole practice is lost already, devoid of spontaneity.
Collaging is expressive, creative, and spontaneous reflection. Collaging develops pictorial insights into one's life, especially the most concealed, shrouded sides of life. Sides to which we have no words yet. Sides which elude our awareness or cognition. Sides of ourselves we can't look in the eye and avoid.
And collaging allows us to look these parts of our lives in the eye because until the collage is complete, we don't even know what we are looking at. But through the process of browsing and gathering, we already become more open and allowing to whatever is to show up. The practice clears the ground for something to appear. Something insightful, something important, something through which we feel more creative, expressive and ourselves.
D - 30/10/2022