I guess you can say it began in
junior high. Many times when I had liked a particular band or
group, I would compile a quickie scrapbook together. One that
I still have to this very day was one of Culture Club. I would
spend a few days each week adding to this adolescence ritual deciated
to Boy George and company. The source mostly came from newspaper
and magazine clippings. It came from a variety of sources, from
respected publishing like "Rolling Stone", local newspapers
"The Daily News", sugary teen pop mags, light weight
fare like "People" to utter crap like "The National
Inquirer". (One that I still treasure is Boy George interviewing
Paul Weller, when he was still in The Style Council. That one
came outof the UK import "Number One") Later on I created
one for my all time favorite group, Siouxsie and The Banshees,
but most of the engery by then went to finding rare albums and
singles instead of concreting on that particular scrapbook.
I started doing collages during
high school. Being a semi-pack rat, I had saved many magazine
and newspaper clippings of interest. The majority were of bands
that I had liked back then, like Siouxsie and The Banshees, Sisters
Of Mercy, Nina Hagen, Bauhaus, and later on Punk bands like X-Ray
Specs. I would buy those hard cover blank art books and throw
everything in there. Eventually other types of images started
to rear its little heads, like those tiny Catholic cards of the
Virgin Mary, underground movies, personal photographs, alternative
fashion, club passes, erotica and pornography. Oh yeah, a lot
of my cartoons were also thrown in to the mix. I even did a silly
collage of everyday food labels! Back then, when I did collages,
I wasn't trying to say anything, or express a view point. I just
did it.
I can't say why I like collages.
(Also one of the main reasons why I had made this webpage) Maybe
it's a way of re-arranging images that have appealed to me, in
order to create something entirely different. Some had said that
collages is not really proper "art". I disagree. It
takes time to create one. I do admit that collecting stuff for
collages can get messy and cluttery. One way to look at collages
is that it's sort of like rumbling through a thrift store; you
know that the item is second hand. However, one person's junk
can be another's person's treasure. Hell, most of those personal
home pages on the Internet are nothing more than one big digital
collage. People dig up cute gifs and JPGs that they found on one
of those freebie sites, and throw it on their own electronic space.
Take this example...back then in
the Ziggy Stardust days, David Bowie was very influenced by author
William Burroughs. William Burroughs and another writer experimented
with creating something with the "cut-up" method. So
what David Bowie did was to create a song using the same method.
The result was "Moonage Daydream". And that, is what
a collage can be; a visual daydream.
