Wednesday, April 24, 2024: CotD, and Some Reflections on the Medium
Collage of the day and medium musings
Musing on the Medium
Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the message.
A few times lately, as I’ve been churning through collage production on my way to assembling 200 for record inserts (up to 134 as of this writing!), I’ve ended up with a couple or three that are irregularly shaped—as is the case with the paid subscriber NSFW one below). (Album pre-orders here—get a collage! win a guitar!)
It kind of bugs me, the irregular shape, but it bugs me in a way I kind of like, like pushing on a loose tooth; it’s a productive discomfort. What does it produce? I dunno. Fairy-tooth-teeth equivalents.
I could make them (these irregularly shaped collages) regularly shaped, by filling in and creating a rectangle, but that’s starting to make less and less sense—like I would be imposing rules on how the images are permitted to come together. As if the final product has to be rectangular—even though there’s no reason for that to be a requirement.
I’ve started to like it when the paper is obvious, like when a model’s elbow is cut off by a page-edge in the source image, and the arm just goes flat where it should curve like an akimbo human arm. But then dropping that model/arm into a new context, that flat-edge-elbow might be mid-image—highlighting the fact that the assembled picture is doctored (is an assemblage), as well as the materiality of the medium.
When I started this sprint to 200 collages, I couldn’t tolerate the loss of verisimilitude that the flat elbow induced for me. I would find ways to cheat/accommodate the happenstance of the paper scraps I’m working with, by say, putting the model at the edge of my collage and having the flat-edge of the arm also hit the edge of the assembled image. In the collage excerpt below from an early-in-the-series example, I half-ass tried to fill out the elbow with flesh tone from another paper scrap.
I still like this one (I made a sticker based on it), but I wouldn’t do the same thing now. Is that what gets called “growth” in other contexts? “Change,” at least, which feels more appropriately neutral, and not connotatively self-congratulatory like “growth.”
I keep thinking about how willfully archaic it is to do these collages this way. This is an analog method. It’s as archaic as releasing an album on vinyl or shopping at a mall. If I were 20 years younger, maybe 10, it would make no sense to me to collect and cut up old magazines. I would just Photoshop it all. But I straddle the analog/digital line generationally. For whatever reason, doing these collages on the computer sounds like no fun at all—even though it would vastly increase my options and control.
I actually like the constraint of working with the physical paper. That is what is productive, in the uncomfortable loose-tooth way mentioned above—the limitations. They’re what make it interesting, and not just a free-for-all. I feel the same way about limitation/constraint in recording music, and I’ll write about that some time.
CotD!
Today’s collage is one that is excerpted as an example above, one that I turned into a sticker; it’s called; Marl, Bro!
And for my extra-special Condor Wing Tippers, an NSFW delight: Above the Fruited
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