The History Channel Collages
THE HISTORY CHANNEL COLLAGES
“A lot of the pictures I had bought would be from newspapers, and they would be of local celebrities, whatever. The mayor, the fire chief, some dignitary, and a lot of them would be pointing to things, shaking hands, and smiling at the- you know, it’s a photo-op, and standing with the president and that kind of thing. And I was attracted but repulsed by these, and I realized why I was repulsed by them was that I was there isolated in my studio, and these people were making decisions that would probably affect me, you know, and I was not doing anything about it, and that was one of the arguments I had with art in the first place, is that it’s not doing anything. I was using these price stickers, and I just put them over the faces, and I said, wow. A phrase I kept using is that it leveled the playing field. All of the sudden they had no power on me, and I really saw them for what they were. They were replacable. Even though the person changes.”
-John Baldessari
These collages aim to include a massive amount of information within a limited frame. Each collage focuses on a main theme, event or person, from history and incorporates images that, through their arrangement, convey very specific ideas regarding the content. The images are sourced from google, and laid down on paper, where the act of painting and drawing begins to integrate them, and elaborate on their relationships to one another. Appropriation plays a key role in this series, as it allows me to quickly, and easily access vast amounts of reference material in a very economical manner. Technical skill in this series rakes a back seat to the conceptual.
Appropriation also functions as an act of power from the cultural fabric of history- these collages treat history as a source to be mined, and arranged in ways that collapse the distance between seemingly unrelated bits of information. When humorously re-contextualized, these new relationships illustrate the fact that as individuals we are all of relatively equal power. It is only through others, especially in posterity, than any one individual can hope to put all the pieces together. These collages reach for the Longview, and stress the fact that each one of us must come to our own understanding of the histories of humanity as a single, tightly interconnected entity.
“A lot of the pictures I had bought would be from newspapers, and they would be of local celebrities, whatever. The mayor, the fire chief, some dignitary, and a lot of them would be pointing to things, shaking hands, and smiling at the- you know, it’s a photo-op, and standing with the president and that kind of thing. And I was attracted but repulsed by these, and I realized why I was repulsed by them was that I was there isolated in my studio, and these people were making decisions that would probably affect me, you know, and I was not doing anything about it, and that was one of the arguments I had with art in the first place, is that it’s not doing anything. I was using these price stickers, and I just put them over the faces, and I said, wow. A phrase I kept using is that it leveled the playing field. All of the sudden they had no power on me, and I really saw them for what they were. They were replacable. Even though the person changes.”
-John Baldessari
These collages aim to include a massive amount of information within a limited frame. Each collage focuses on a main theme, event or person, from history and incorporates images that, through their arrangement, convey very specific ideas regarding the content. The images are sourced from google, and laid down on paper, where the act of painting and drawing begins to integrate them, and elaborate on their relationships to one another. Appropriation plays a key role in this series, as it allows me to quickly, and easily access vast amounts of reference material in a very economical manner. Technical skill in this series rakes a back seat to the conceptual.
Appropriation also functions as an act of power from the cultural fabric of history- these collages treat history as a source to be mined, and arranged in ways that collapse the distance between seemingly unrelated bits of information. When humorously re-contextualized, these new relationships illustrate the fact that as individuals we are all of relatively equal power. It is only through others, especially in posterity, than any one individual can hope to put all the pieces together. These collages reach for the Longview, and stress the fact that each one of us must come to our own understanding of the histories of humanity as a single, tightly interconnected entity.
