Brief
Research Task: Brooklyn Collage Collective
Spend some time exploring the links below and the work of the Brooklyn Collage Collective. Reflect on how collage as a medium might connect with ideas of contemporary collaboration, networks and ecologies.
Brooklyn Collage Collective website
Introduction to Communities of Practice
A New Kind of Collaboration
The Social Turn: Collaboration and its DiscontentsThe Brooklyn Collage Collective was founded in 2013 by Morgan Jesse Lappin. The mission statement of the collective is to “break the boundaries of what collage is or can be” and bring attention and credibility to collage as a medium and its ability to create a dialogue through assemblage. Perhaps, most relevant to the idea of collage as a medium for contemporary collaboration, the collective’s overarching aim was to create a strong community of collage artists.
The current website only lists three interviews of collage artists and I was wondering if I could get a better understanding of the collective through historical archive so I searched the wayback machine.
Back in 2015, the collective had 8 members: Lizzie Gill, Kieran Madden, Daniel Greer, Mike DeSutter, Jay Riggio, Linzi Silverman, Elise Margolis, and Allie Olson and Lizzie was listed as the co-founder of the collective, it’s unclear why she has been erased from this history but she’s possibly the artist with the most accomplished professional career, by looking at the website.
This historical bleep aside, the collective still connect artists through social media although perhaps in a superficial way with artists sign-posting their profile in an instagram post.
On reflection, I’m not sure a medium (be it collage, painting, or animation) can be a strong hook for networks or ecologies. Looking at the original members of the collective, they all had different approaches to the medium, different messages they sought to convey, different identities. I would imagine a collective assembled along an idea, a theme, a shared purpose, would be in a better position to develop a lasting network. The Guerrilla Girls come to mind although I have read they had their share of infighting so there is a non-negligible human factor in the success and longevity of art collectives.
I still find the idea of contributing to a collective compelling in theory, we all strive to feel we belong and I am no exception. I have often initiated community activities for that reason but always with mixed feelings as I am uncomfortable being in social groups, perhaps because I grew up as a single child. Also perhaps because our modern society is worshipping the idea of the individual success, the stars the influencer and their “followers”. We have lost our ways in how to be collectively together while we give our time away in bits and are the unknowing puppets of the MANGOS.
On a personal practice note, however, I stumbled across a collage Skillshare class from Morgan Jesse Lappin himself and that was very helpful in making me think about collage in a more structured way, from foreground and background, image sources, thinking about cuts to place characters in a scene, and portals and windows. I created a digital collage piece as a result, with a mix of my own photograph and found . Strictly speaking, I understand this puts me outside of the “analog collage” tradition but I don’t have an issue with it. I do enjoy the process a lot, whether it is on paper or on my tablet.
