THINKING / NOT THINKING
A collage exercise in instinct, interruption and making something tangible.
Sometimes I need to make something for absolutely no reason.
Not for a collection.
Not for a client.
Not because I need another image.
Not because I already know what it is supposed to become.
I just need to make.
This started with an old promotional booklet of my photography that I made about a decade ago. It had been sitting around long enough that I no longer felt particularly precious about it. So I ripped it apart.
Page by page.
There is something I really enjoy about destroying something I previously considered finished. Ten years ago these photographs were selected, edited, sequenced, printed and bound together because I had decided, at that moment, this is the object.
Finished.
Now it was material.
I spread the photographs out and started going through the boxes and piles of things I have saved for collage. Scraps of paper. Old printed matter. Things that caught my attention years ago for reasons I probably couldn't explain then and still couldn't explain now.
Eventually I found a Superman comic book from 1971.
So I started cutting it apart too.
A face.
A speech bubble.
A car.
A strange advertisement.
A hand.
A headline.
A piece of someone's body.
SUPERMAN.
DREAM GIRL.
$9,785.01 FOR THIS PENNY!
Things completely detached from whatever story they originally belonged to.
That is when it gets interesting to me.
Once I cut something out, I don't really care anymore about what it was supposed to mean.
The man in the comic is no longer necessarily a man in a comic. A car doesn't have to be a car. A speech bubble doesn't need the conversation that came before it. A piece of someone's face can become somebody else's face.
I started placing these pieces over my photographs.
Move it left.
No.
Turn it.
Too obvious.
Cover his face.
Yes.
Maybe cover his entire head.
Better.
Put the car there.
Why?
I don't know.
Good.
And I think that I don't know is an incredibly important part of making things.
I spend so much of my life thinking. Looking. Editing. Rearranging. Imagining ten different versions of something before I've even made the first one. My brain can build an entire world very quickly, which is useful until that same brain starts demanding explanations for everything inside of it.
Why is that there?
What does it mean?
Is this good?
Does this belong with the other work?
Will someone understand it?
And sometimes the only answer I want is:
because I put it there.
There is something very Dada about that permission.
Not randomness exactly. I don't think these collages are random at all.
Every placement is a decision.
But it is a decision made before language has a chance to interfere with it.
My eye says yes before my brain can prepare the PowerPoint presentation explaining why.
That is the exercise.
Think.
Think.
Think.
Then stop thinking.
Do.
Cut.
Move.
Place.
Glue.
Next.
I wanted to strengthen the part of my brain that recognizes something before it understands something.
Because I think that is where a lot of my creative work begins.
A feeling appears first.
The explanation usually arrives later.
Sometimes much later.
And turning that feeling into something physical is how I begin to understand what was going on inside my head in the first place.
That is probably why collage has always made sense to me. It gives thought a body.
Something completely internal suddenly exists on a piece of paper in front of me.
You can point at it.
You can hold it.
You can photograph it.
The thought has become an object.
And these particular collages became strange little collisions between two already-existing worlds.
My photographs were one world.
The 1971 Superman comic was another.
Neither needed the other.
But once they were cut apart and placed together, a third thing appeared.
The photographs stopped behaving completely like portraits.
The comic stopped behaving completely like a comic.
Sometimes the men disappear underneath illustrated men. Sometimes something masculine gets interrupted by something feminine. A graphic advertisement becomes clothing. A car becomes modesty. A cartoon face becomes a mask. Words written more than fifty years ago suddenly sound like they are being spoken by somebody I photographed decades later.
I like not completely knowing what I am looking at.
Is it one of my portraits?
Yes.
Is it a comic book page?
Yes.
Is it neither anymore?
Probably.
That little confusion is exciting to me.
It is an escape.
Not necessarily an escape from reality, but an escape deeper into my own creative brain.
And I have always found that place incredibly adventurous.
There are rooms in there I haven't been inside yet.
There are combinations I haven't seen.
Objects I haven't made.
Photographs I haven't taken.
Ideas I haven't learned how to explain.
Sometimes I think creating is just finding different ways of opening those doors.
This time the door happened to be an old photography booklet, a pair of scissors and a Superman comic from 1971.
No sketch.
No plan.
No correct answer.
No incorrect answer.
Just enough thinking to begin—
and then getting out of my own way.
amadeo amadeo