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I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue
--William S. Burroughs ("Art of Fiction" 29)
Cutting Up Consumer Culture: "Big Daddy"
1.
In her article "The Invention of Collage," Marjorie Perloff begins the story of collage at what she considers its end, a playful and private work created by her own children. Nancy and Carey Perloff have cut up newspapers and magazines to create a sentimental birthday card for their father, "Big Daddy" (see Figure 1).
CAPTION: Figure 1
Figure 1: Nancy and Carey Perloff, Birthday Collage for Daddy (Perloff 5)
This collage has been made by taking ready-made texts and images and reassembling the fragments into a new composition; in both its private context and its sentimental application, it calls to mind a long tradition of homespun collage creations that date back centuries but are most commonly found in the domestic scrapbooks and novelty creations of thousands of anonymous collagists of the nineteenth century. These works of folk art, rarely displayed and almost always made for private use and pleasure, were created out of whatever material was at hand--photographs, stamps, illustrations and text from books, newspapers, or other printed matter. In "Big Daddy," according to Perloff, "the pleasure and fun for both the collage makers and for the recipient arise from the realization that items already in print--found objects, as it were--can be spliced and recombined so as to transfer reference from the impersonal to the personal domain" (6). Perloff's observation is readily confirmed if one remembers at least one version of the Dadaist inspiration for collage at the beginning of the century:
[Raoul Hausmann] asserts that the germ of the idea was planted while he and Hannah Höch were on holiday in the summer of 1918 on the Baltic coast, where they saw in almost every house a framed coloured lithograph with the image of a soldier against a background of barracks. "To make this military memento more personal, a photographic portrait had been stuck on in the place of the head." (Ades 19)
The family of a soldier pasting in the picture of their own son's face over the anonymous image on the patriotic, illustrated postcards of the time performs the public-to-private transformation that Perloff...