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David Evans, “Cut and Paste,” History of Photography ISSN: 0308-7298 (Print) 2150-7295 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/thph20 Cut and Paste David Evans To cite this article: David Evans (2019) Cut and Paste, History of Photography, 43:2, 156-168 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2019.1695408 Published online: 17 Feb 2020. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=thph20 Cut and Paste † David Evans Published posthumously, this article begins with a discussion of the historiogra- phy – and a related exhibition history – of the terms collage, photo-collage, and photomontage; and of the criteria that have been used to distinguish them as techniques, as visual idioms, and for their political implications and resonances as images of fine or applied art. The article then moves on to the work of two living artists who have been cutting and pasting photographs for more than forty years, Martha Rosler and John Stezaker, and the ambiguities of their being described as collagists, monteurs, or photomonteurs. In rethinking these categories, Evans argues for an expansive history of photomontage and collage that has continuing resonance today. Keywords: Martha Rosler (1943–present), John Stezaker (1949–present), collage, photo-collage, photomontage, John Heartfield (1891–1968), Hannah Höch (1889–1978), El Lissitzky (1890–1941), Alexandr Rodchenko (1891–1956) Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has become – amongst many other things – an † incommensurable photographic archive, providing a rich resource for an unpre- See the entry on David Evans in the sec- cedented number of amateurs and professionals who wish to ‘cut and paste’, tion on Contributors at the end of this often using editing software like Photoshop. At the same time, the pervasiveness issue. Our thanks to Fred Poinat and Chloe Evans for their help and permission of electronic media has encouraged a renewed enthusiasm for working with real to publish this. scalpels and scissors, paper, and paste, as well as an engagement with the history of the combined photographic image across the twentieth century. There is an abundanceofneologismsthatseektocharacterisethiscontemporaryphenom- enon – mash-up, remixing, and sampling are some obvious examples, all regis- tering the influence of DJ culture on contemporary art. In addition, however, the ongoing use of older terms like collage, photo-collage, and photomontage is associated with the activities of the historic avant-gardes in the first half of the twentieth century. The contemporary combined image has been the theme of numerous international surveys in recent years. Much of the related critical writing offers a bewildering mix of old and new concepts, adding to the confu- sion by often throwing in notions from the mid or late twentieth century like assemblage, détournement, and appropriation. An overall assessment of the whole of this thicket of terms, however, is not my aim in this article. Rather, I begin by considering the terms collage, photo- collage, and photomontage. This discussion then informs my case studies of two artists who have been ‘cutting and pasting’ photographs, literally and sometimes virtually, for more than four decades, and who both regularly feature in shows on contemporary collage. Case study one: Martha Rosler, sympathetic to the history of photomontage, but not opposed to being in exhibitions devoted to collage. Case study two: John Stezaker, currently happy with the label collagist, and generally averse to being described as a monteur. History of Photography, Volume 43, Number 2, May 2019 https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2019.1695408 # 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Cut and Paste Past Differentiating collage, photo-collage, and photomontage according to technical criteria continues to be highly influential, exemplified by the writings of American curator and scholar William Rubin. He associates collage with pasting diverse materials onto paper or canvas; photo-collage is a collage in which photographic fragments are an important component; and photomontage involves some form of darkroom work like making sized prints, or sandwiching negatives in an enlarger. In the catalogue of the 1968 exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, Rubin writes of the Dadaists in Berlin: ‘The most significant contribution of the Berlin group was the elaboration of the so-called photomontage, actually a photo- 1 1 – William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and collage, since the images were not montaged in the darkroom’. His emphasis on their Heritage, New York: Museum of what artists did, rather than what they said they were doing, continues to Modern Art 1968, 42. reverberate. Rubin’s distinctions are implicitly endorsed in Peter Galassi’s essay about the photography of Alexandr Rodchenko for a catalogue accompanying a major exhibition on all aspects of the artist’s work, held at New York’s MoMA in 1998. Three decades after the exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, Galassi describes work that artists in 1920s Germany or the Soviet Union would have called photomontage, as ‘photocollage’ (without Rubin’s hyphen). Thus, he 2 2 – Peter Galassi, ‘Rodchenko and discusses Raoul Hausmann’s reflections on ‘the rise of photocollage’, even though Photography’s Revolution’,inAleksandr the former Berlin Dadaist did not used the term in ‘Photomontage’, a talk he gave Rodchenko, ed. Magdalena Dubrowski, at the 1931 exhibition also titled Photomontage.3 Elza Adamowicz similarly Leah Dickerson, and Peter Galassi, ’ New York: Museum of Modern Art 1998, deploys Rubin s distinctions in her major study of interwar Surrealist collage. 107. She, too, assumes that collage is the basic category, and photo-collage and photo- 3 – Raoul Hausmann, ‘Photomontage’,in montage are subcategories, that is, forms of collage with a photographic dimen- Photography in the Modern Era: European sion. For Adamowicz, the main criterion for distinguishing a Surrealist photo- Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Phillips, collage from a Surrealist photomontage is whether or not the image was created in 4 New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/ a darkroom. Aperture 1989, 178–81. The limitations of the technical orientation particularly associated with – 4 Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Rubin was implicitly challenged in the ambitious 1991 exhibition Montage Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite – Corpse, Cambridge: Cambridge University and Modern Life 1919 1942 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston. Press 1998, 142–44. Its material was mainly from Germany, the Soviet Union, and the USA, in a period roughly framed by the two world wars. ‘Original’ photomontages, which often used photographic fragments taken from the illustrated press, were juxtaposed with mass-produced examples that often used the illustrated press as an outlet. Celebrated avant-garde practitioners rubbed shoulders with anon- ymous or barely known figures, and wide-ranging work from various countries was displayed in bold thematic sections.Inaddition,theinclusionofafilm programme as an integral element of the exhibition drew attention to the links between cinematic editing – or montage – and photomontage. Overall, the exhibition sought to prove that montage, still and moving, effectively registered the basic characteristics of modern life such as discontinuity, fragmentation, repetition, and simultaneity. In his preface to the catalogue, Matthew Teitelbaum claims that the exhibition Montage and Modern Life ‘invokes the 5 5 – Matthew Teitelbaum, ‘Preface’,in discontinuous and the ruptured as the talismans of our century’. In a similar Montage and Modern Life 1919–1942, ed. vein, the introduction by Christopher Phillips presents montage as an innova- Matthew Teitelbaum, Cambridge, MA: tive technique that also functioned ‘as a kind of symbolic form, providing MIT Press 1992, 7. a shared visual idiom that more than any other expressed the tumultuous 6 6 – Christopher Phillips, ‘Introduction’,in arrival of a fully urbanized, industrial culture’. ibid., 22. Montage and Modern Life successfully responded to the widespread view that photomontage is a mere footnote in the history of collage, but the exhibition was not without problems. Firstly, giving equal weight to material from Germany, the Soviet Union, and the USA drew attention away from a central paradox: in Weimar Germany, especially, the USA was so widely associated with ‘modern life’ that the neologism ‘Americanism’ was often used as another way of saying 157 David Evans Modernism, yet photomontage emerged there far later than in either Germany or the Soviet Union. Significantly, Sally Stein’s contribution to the exhibition catalo- 7 gue is subtitled ‘American Resistance to Photomontage between the Wars’. 7 – Sally Stein, ‘American Resistance to Secondly, the thematic presentation ended up obscuring how photomontage sig- Photomontage Between the Wars’, in ibid., – nificantly evolved in the interwar period. Thirdly, the exhibition left unanswered 128 89. how photomontage related to collage. I address these issues in reverse order, starting with a consideration of two earlier exhibitions dealing with collage and photomontage, respectively. An exhibition of collages by twelve artists was held in 1930 at the Galerie Goemans in Paris, with a tie-in publication by Surrealist poet Aragon called La Peinture
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