Deep in the ocean, an orca pod is on the hunt.But these aren't your average orcas.These guys are organized.Marketing team, did you get those social media posts scheduled for the seal migration?Aye aye, captain.
We even have an automated notification for all pod managers when they go live.They use monday.com to keep their teamwork sharp, their communication clear, and their goals in sight.
monday.com For whatever you run, even orcas, go to monday.com to dive deeper.
This episode is brought to you by National Geographic, presenting its new documentary film, Endurance.
Follow the greatest survival story ever told, unpacking the legendary feat of polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, who kept his crew alive for over a year, despite losing the ship in frigid pack ice.
Over a century later, a team of modern day explorers set out to find the sunken ship.Endurance, now streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
This episode is brought to you by Opel, the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the U.S.Opel is FDA-approved, full prescription strength, and estrogen-free.Plus, there's no prescription needed.
Finally, the days of needing a prescription for birth control are over.Opel is available online and at most major retailers.Take control of your health and reproductive journey with Opel, birth control in your control.
Use code BIRTCONTROL for 25% off your first month of Opel at opel.com.
Welcome to The New Books Network.
I'm your host, Kendal Denneen, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Freya Gowerly.Freya is a lecturer in history of art and liberal arts at the University of Bristol, and her new book, Fragmentary Forms, A New History of Collage
is a breathtakingly, I cannot say enough how beautiful this book is.It's a breathtakingly beautiful and encyclopedic history of collage from its earliest beginnings.
And that book is going to be available from Princeton University Press on November the 12th.Thank you so much for being here today.I'm so excited to chat with you.Thank you so much, Kendall.I'm really thrilled to be here.
So to kick us off, can you tell me a little bit about how you came to the project of the book?
Yeah, so it's quite a long story in many ways, but I won't talk for too long, but essentially I was doing my PhD research, which looks at domestic space in Britain in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
And there were a couple of spaces that came up, both of which were inhabited by and decorated by women.And they had this kind of collagic explosion of fragmentary decoration applied to their walls and surfaces.And I was really fascinated by this.
And the spaces that I'm talking about are Alleronde, which is the home of Jane and Mary Parmenter. in Exeter, in Devon, and the other house is Plas Nowyth, the home of the ladies of Llangollen who many understand as kind of
sort of pre-modern lesbian heroines who have a really interesting story and relationship.But both of these houses are characterized by what I'll sort of come to talk about as fragmentary forms.
So they have explorations of things like shells and feathers and fragments of stained glass applied to their interiors and sometimes their exteriors.And basically, I was looking for a way to conceptualize this form of production.
And I was, collage was the kind of first thing that I grabbed towards.
And I was accordingly frustrated by the kind of histories that I was reading, which tended to, as I think we'll come to later to talk about, but they tended to really not deal with anything before the modern period.
And for me, I could see commonalities and a kind of formal quality that extended far earlier than this in terms of using found objects, thinking about ready-made materials and then incorporating those into creative productions that to me resonated in really interesting ways with this modern stuff.
So I kind of then developed that into the sort of second project, the big kind of postdoc project.
I started working with Dr. Cole Collins, who's a really wonderful colleague who has been based at the University of Edinburgh and we set up a collage research network.We still run events and we host a blog.
And I was also asked to contribute to a big exhibition that was happening in Edinburgh. in 2019 called Cut and Paste, 400 Years of Collage.
And that again really crystallized my thinking because that exhibition started with an early modern sort of approach to the material and went all the way through to the present.So yeah, between my own interest
Working on the collage research network and the exhibition, this really became a kind of obsession.And then I was approached by a publisher who was looking to develop a long history of collage and I guess the rest of history, as they say.
So yeah, it's quite a convoluted story, but I guess all good academic stories are.
So I think it would be helpful.I feel like this is kind of a maybe a broad question because the book is answering this question, what is collage over, you know, many, many pages.
But if you can give our listeners sort of an idea of how you're defining collage, I think that would be really helpful.
Yes.In many senses, this is the million dollar question.And I'm not even sure that the book sort of proposes a very satisfying answer to this question. I'm interested in maybe what it means to think about what collage is and how we define it.
The phrase itself doesn't appear until the 20th century.So if we wanted to sort of take it on a more limited definitional model, you might talk about collage coming from the idea of the French verb to coller, you know, to glue.
and accordingly the notion of papier collé as being this sort of paper glued to paper. And that provides us with a kind of limited model and that accords with sort of early modernism, cubist approaches, that kind of thing.
But for me, it doesn't really get to grips with all of the kind of great potential that collage as a juxtapositionary form, so a thing which is made from other things really has.
For me, the kinds of collage that the book examines includes far more stuff than just paper.So sometimes it's natural materials like stone, bones, plants, flowers, and shells.Sometimes they're cultural objects like printed pages or newspapers.
And sometimes it's made through a plethora of different tools and glues and all of this kind of stuff.So for me, that papier colling model doesn't quite work.Assemblage is another term which comes to mind.
But again, it has a quite a specific historical kind of association. So I guess for me, what I'm interested in the book and yeah, this is why it's called a history of collage rather than the history of collage.
I'm interested in this human urge to combine things together, to bring together materials, whether they are from wholly diverse origin points or they're made from more synchronous kinds of materials.And this practice to me seems to be
trans-historical, trans-geographical, and to be a really human way of engaging with the material around you.So for me, I'm thinking about collage as a kind of way of experiencing the world and of making order from those experiences.I think
The way in which I'm defining collage is probably one of my big concerns around the book and how it will be received.Because I think there's a way you can kind of be like very dismissive and sort of say, okay, but all those things aren't collage.
And I'm not sure I'm saying that all of them are necessarily, but that I'm trying to kind of provoke a conversation, I guess, about what we consider, what we privilege in that conversation around defining collage.Do we privilege paper?
Do we privilege kind of modernist experimentation?Or do we privilege this very kind of almost universal urge to stick stuff together?
I think the book does a great job of showing why it's interesting and generative to think about collage more flexibly, right?And I think that's always a great thing.
So I think you've kind of answered this, but I want to give you a chance if there's some other things that you want to include.So I want to ask, how do you see your book intervening in existing histories of collage?
Yes, I think I've touched on this a little already.
But those early histories that I was reading, they're really important, great works like Collage, the book by the German art historian Herta Verscher, you know, and similar books by Eddie Wolfram, which look at a kind of expanded history of collage.
Both of those include early sort of antecedents, but they're sort of presented as being kind of weird, related cousins.They're like, they're a bit like this, but they're not really serious.
And so I was kind of interested in what if we take that relationship seriously.
Some dedicated works on collage see that distinction in a very serious sense, that what, say, Picasso and Braque, who were figured as inventing collage in 1912, what they do is something which is wholly distinct from things women predominantly made earlier.
And so I also see kind of what I'm doing is a bit of a feminist intervention, a kind of queer intervention.
And I'm also following in work done in exhibitions, so Cut and Paste, which I've already mentioned, which offered this really dynamic approach to the material.
But as early as 1960, there was an exhibition curated by William Sykes, which called The Art of Assemblage. which had a really encompassing definitional model.
It didn't go as far back into history, but he was interested in the kind of possibilities of what it meant to bring collage as paper and assemblages from later periods all into conversation because of this juxtapositionary mode.
So I'm really kind of building on all of that work
the work done by individual scholars, people like Maude Levan, who talks about Hannah Hoek extensively in her brilliant book, like building on work by people like Christine Poges, In Defiance of Painting, which is about this modernist narrative of invention.
And I'm trying to sort of bring together some of these histories.So
thinking about these art forms simultaneously, rather than kind of working in line with the disciplinary and chronological divisions, which we often have to sort of keep our work bounded within.
So I want to talk about something that is sort of in the early pages of the book.
You mentioned, or will you discuss, not just mention, you discussed these three methods and materials that you describe as ancestors for the kinds of collage that the rest of the book is going to examine.
Can you walk us through those three methods and materials?Yeah, sure.
I think ancestors in a way I realize I use that.It suggests a kind of linearity but all three of the forms that I sort of identify as having these long histories which intersect with that of collage are things that still get produced today.
And so it's a kind of that first chapter is about long histories, which still have kind of cultural ramifications today.And those those three kind of materials and forms that I talk about are early Chinese developments in papermaking and paper cuts.
I also talk about Bowdoin art, which is a West African art form, and specifically boccia sculptures.And then finally, I also talk about other work made in pre-colonial Mesoamerica, and also, again, more recently, following colonialism.
So yeah for me those practices offer a useful mode of understanding these longer histories in part because they're very significant historically but they have ongoing significance.
So for example, paper in its traditional sense is, you know, produced from a dried fiber pulp, which is sort of pressed together and then dried.And this dates back, we have archeological evidence of this right back to 8 BCE.
So this is a very long standing form of production. And this is specifically associated with Chinese invention, specifically.And this is really important in lots of ways for the intellectual history of the globe.
and in terms of letters and communication but one of the things that comes out of this is the Chinese practice of paper cutting.
This has a big cultural revival after President Mao and so is still practiced to this day but we have really, really early examples of paper cuts and these tend to be produced at times of celebration,
and then displayed in kind of not commemorative spaces, but, you know, spaces of that celebration and which still happens today.There's certain forms which reoccur that often made out of this really beautiful red paper, which symbolizes good luck.
But that is a tradition that stretches all the way back and which we can see absolutely having a kind of effect on Western cultural traditions as well.
Like with boccio, it's a really interesting example and it's one that sort of gets us to think about Western art historical preferences and hierarchies because boccio, which are small kind of religious artifacts, which would often be found on Vodun shrines in Benin and Togo regions,
These are, yeah, small artifacts made from many parts.They're sort of characterized by a visual culture of accretion and assemblage.
And so scholars have sort of thought about this in terms of a counter-aesthetics, which African art really exemplifies, that while Western aesthetic hierarchies privilege simplicity and clean lines, et cetera, et cetera, one of the things that's really interesting about
Vodun art is that they value the opposite thing, right?They value the assembled, the messy, the assimilation of multiple elements all together, which makes a very complicated objects.
And in fact, that is what gives them their power to act as fetishes.So often these are objects which are viewed as having a kind of power over other people, whether that's something which might
protect you from illness or witchcraft or something like that.So, and again, this is a practice which still exists to this day and is often sort of has found re-articulation in the sort of transatlantic practices that we now know as voodoo, right?
So you can see the heritage of that thing.
Subtle results, still you, but with fewer lines.Botox Cosmetic Out of Botulinum Toxin A is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults.
Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms.Alert your doctor right away as difficulties swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition.
Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.Don't receive Botox Cosmetic if you have a skin infection.
Side effects may include allergic reactions, injection site pain, headache, eyebrow and eyelid drooping, and eyelid swelling.Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness.Tell your doctor about medical history.
muscle or nerve conditions including ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eden syndrome in medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
For full safety information visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300.See for yourself at BotoxCosmetic.com
Blinds.com is taking off the savings early with Black Friday Mega Deals all month long.A Blinds.com design expert can help you make the perfect selection on your schedule.
We can even handle everything from measure to your whole home installed for just one low cost.With over 25 million windows covered, Blinds.com is the number one online retailer of custom window coverings.
Save up to 45% on select styles, plus a free professional measure right now at Blinds.com.Rules and restrictions may apply.
So these are the sort of three precedents that I identify early on, but which are interesting also because they have this long legacy.
So throughout the book you have what I think of as like case studies, kind of these like specific examples, right, that you want us to to attend to.
And I think the first one, or one of the very early ones, is enclosed gardens, which I thought were just so fascinating.Would you tell the listeners a little bit about enclosed gardens?Yes.
Yeah, they come, I think, chapter two, the sort of case study associated. And I really wanted to have those case studies just as opportunities to sort of reflect on individual objects or classes of objects in a little bit more detail.
And I was really excited to dedicate one of those spaces to enclosed gardens.They're sometimes known as horticonclusi, but essentially they are a distinct genre of mixed media assemblage. made in medieval Europe.
We know from infantries that huge numbers were initially made, but actually few examples exist.And there is one incredibly rich repository of the artifacts in Mechelen in Belgium.
And in the 16th century, this was home to a collective of Augustinian nuns.And they had this really close relationship with town over whom they were viewed as giving protection.
And these objects basically survived in their living quarters until relatively recently.And yeah, they're a really good example of the way in which collage in its early forms was a site, a potent site for expressing religious belief and belonging.
So we often think about religion and religious feeling as being very immaterial, right, it's about things that you can't see or tangibly feel.But our objects in this manner help us to sort of see how that becomes materialized.
So the enclosed gardens are, they're really quite inscrutable on earth objects.They're beautiful sort of box spaces, which encompass a wild array of materials.So things like scraps of fabric, small rolls of paper, body parts from saints, we
or so we're told, they might have bits of plant matter, semi-precious gemstones and ready-made objects, which might be selected because they're associated with something important or have kind of religious significance.
So yeah, a saint's relic, for example, would fit within that category.And that sort of forms the background along with lots of beautiful silk flowers, which are made associated with kind of female forms of production.
Yeah, these, they kind of form a beautiful, glittering, grotto-like stage for the sort of playing out of religious scenes.So often we'll see things like the crucified Christ or the Virgin Mary.
And these are little kind of sculptures made from walnut by artisans in the region.And then these get incorporated into the nuns kind of handiwork.So there's an interesting,
kind of alignment between local artisanal kind of handicrafts made by men and craft practices undertaken by women.And the space of the garden is really interesting, it's often associated with Mary, she herself,
is recorded in one biblical story as making silk flowers for the Christ child.
So by doing that same thing, the nuns are engaging in this sort of holy imitation of the Virgin, where they themselves dedicate their spare time, their creativity in the service of the Lord and devotion.
So we don't really know what these objects are for, but we are entranced by them.And we're very interested in thinking about what they might mean.But yes, as I said, they're very inscrutable objects.
And this is an issue with a lot of the material that I look at in the book.But yeah, I'd argue that their collage nature and their relation to other forms helps us to sort of understand their potential application.
They're absolutely gorgeous.I was so fascinated.I'd never heard of them before, so I was so fascinated and really excited to learn about them. They are incredibly beautiful.
So moving to your third chapter, can you discuss Cabinets of Curiosities and their relationship to global travel?
Yeah, so I've long been interested in curiosity cabinets, in part because one of the houses I mentioned earlier, A La Ronde, has one inside.But essentially, these are
cabinets which bring together artworks, curiosities, natural materials, bones, all of that good stuff, works of art of various kinds together and displays them as a kind of cabinet which is your designated collection.It sort of shows off your
intellectual prowess, your worldliness, your knowledge, all of those things.
And I was really interested in the book about the relationship between collage and knowledge and how, particularly in the sort of chronological setting of the third chapter, which is the early modern period, how we might understand those things together.
So like what, how collecting and collaging works. collectively, essentially.
And the cabinets, although they're not collage in the traditional sense, and this relates back to some of my earlier points about how we're defining these things, they have a mode of
juxtaposition of proximate display that creates interesting relationships between objects, which is essentially what I'm interested in, in this project in general.
So one of the things about them is that they reflect the, well, they reflect the kind of scientific, imperial and sort of aesthetic interests of that period. So we get examples like that of the Naples-based apothecary Ferrante Imperato.
And his cabinet is very famous because it's actually produced in printed form.So we have an illustration of it, which I include in the book.And this shows just how kind of interesting and piecemeal and diverse these collections are.So there's things
like beetles and shells which cover all of his window surrounds.There are scorpions hanging down on the walls. And there is very famously this humongous alligator suspended from the ceiling of the cabinet.
So he is increasing his renown, his respectability, his status as a man of knowledge by not only owning this space, which we see in the illustration itself gets shown to visitors.
But by having that reproduced and published in print, that also kind of cements his status as this sort of tasteful collector.
So I'd like to move along to grangerization.I thought this was so interesting.So if you can tell us what is grangerization and how does it relate to mass production?
Yeah so one of the things that really runs throughout the book as a whole is this dynamic of collage as a kind of reflection or a kind of something which makes use of technology that's intimately connected with technology throughout its history.
And Grangerization is a good example of this.
named after James Granger whose biographical history of Britain gets published in the early 18th century and when it's first published it doesn't have any illustration but it's a very popular book and so people start to add printed portraits
of the individuals he's talking about, and that gets called Grangerization.We also know it as extra illustration, but it's really with Granger that this craze starts and then people move on to other books, things like
the Bible, various editions, lots of editions of the original Granger and publications by important sort of literary figures of the day, people like Horace Walpole.
And they really make use of that transformation in printing that the early modern period heralds.There's an explosion of print around this time.
And so again, like my earlier point where I talked about how collage reflects regimes of knowledge and technology and material and a way of processing that material world, essentially the extra illustration of these books
is a kind of knowledge, a form of knowledge and of ordering that knowledge and of expressing your interests.And again, these are intellectual as well as creative pursuits.They can still be very intimate histories, though.
And in the chapter, I talk about one example of a grangerized edition of Horace Walpole's description of his home, which is sort of re-embellished by the person who will inherit that house, Anne Damer.
and how she kind of personalizes the book through this process. It's about technology, it's about early kind of embryonic forms of mass production, but it's also about these intimate forms of expression as well.
And that's what I like about collage and the history of collage, I think, is that you can see these two registers of history happening simultaneously.
Big seismic changes at the level of the industrial revolution, but also these incredibly personal and intimate forms.
Yeah, I think that was the most fascinating part of the book to me is getting to see how people sort of intimately process, like you're saying, these massive changes in the world around them.That's so fascinating.
So in your fifth chapter, Desire and Devotion, you examine the rise of Valentines.
And I was so interested in this because I recently went to the Lucille Clifton archives, and she had preserved a very lacy, ornate valentine from her husband that she got in the 1950s.It was so cool.
But yeah, learning about this history was just terrific.So I'm wondering if you can rehearse for our listeners a little bit your examination of the rise and development of the Valentine.
Yeah, of course.In fact, that's a really good example of that sort of paradigm that I just sketched, right?The dynamic, the binary between the big history and the small, the tiny emotion, right?The individual feeling.
And so Valentine's are really intimate.
related to technological developments, whether that's the invention of paper lace, so that kind of lacyness that we see in those very typical Victorian Valentine's cards, or whether that's the invention of chromolithography, which happens, so color printing, that happens in the late 19th century.
And as a result, we start to get scraps, scraps and scraps and scraps. And yeah, people start using them in Valentine's cards.So they're very much associated with those big technological histories.
Arguably they relate to earlier forms of devotional practice and not romantic devotion, but religious devotion.So people have argued that they come from cannabis, which are sort of a particular French kind of prayer card.
And these would often have paper lace. surrounds, but these would be made by hand rather than by the machine.And so we see that as being sort of a physical precedent, as well as something which reflects a dedication to its subject.
But they don't really emerge as a form as we know them today until the 19th century. Until, well, after that period, we see a huge explosion in individuals sending Valentine's cards and receiving them in Britain by the mid 19th century.
60,000 valentines are sent through the post.So it's a huge amount and it's so bad at one point that the Royal Mail is like, please get your valentines in early because we just don't have capacity.
It's very much like the Christmas rush that we have nowadays in the post.And we see people start to sort of capitalise on this and you probably know this. narrative, Kendal, but the mother of the American Valentine, Esther Howland.
And she's a really interesting person because again, she plays on this handmade-ness versus the mass produced.
So she has a company and essentially it's a factory, but the factory is a factory of women makers who copy a sort of prototype Valentine that she made. there's an emphasis still on hand making as a way of expressing like dedication.
Yeah, like that you've spent time on something and that you want that thing to be significant and handwriting, hand making suggests that time investment.So they still look handmade, but they're made on mass according to this prototype, essentially.
So again, you've got that really fascinating binary of The mass-produced and the very intimate emotional history.
I think you have an example of one of these cards, a photo of them in the book, right?And it's sort of imperfect, you know?Yeah, yeah.
And I was like, yeah, there's something about the sort of imperfection that lends it like an air of like authenticity, right?
Yes, and a lot of the writing that gets used on them resembles handwriting, but it's probably a printed text, but it's very hard to tell.
So yeah, I think there's an investment still in that material object as being sentimental, even though you've got so many of them around.
OK, so I'm going to move us to what is a very sentimental for me material object, which is a scrapbook.My mom and I used to go scrapbooking like once a month.It was like a big to do.So I loved learning more about the history of scrapbooking.
Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that history?Yes, absolutely.
I love that you and your mom used to do scrapbooking.That's very adorable. Um, yeah, scrapbooks, they emerge as a form.We think about them predominantly as a 19th century thing, but they have roots in earlier practices.
So they in part derive from commonplacing traditions.So a commonplace book is essentially a literary kind of scrapbook.It's a text. that you would maybe handwrite composed of things that you were reading.
So it's a way of translating again the material that you're consuming intellectually into a kind of an object which holds your notes essentially.
So we see scrapbooks as inheritors in that sense and also sentimental albums which sort of emerge around the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Now these are often sort of albums which get given around essentially.
So you might give one to your pal and be like, please write me a poem in here or your friend might give you a watercolor or do a watercolor in your album.
And then so you have a kind of collected composite collage style object by virtue of just so many people contributing to it.So we can see the sort of inheritance of both of those forms in the scrapbook.
But essentially they, like valentines, emerge as such a compelling form because of the invention of chrobilithography.So you have scraps and it just sort of democratizes that form of production.
You can buy scraps, you can sit and very easily adorn your album.And so scrapbooks, yeah, they're a really interesting form.They're often quite unscrutable as well, as I mentioned earlier with some other objects.
If you don't have a biography associated with them, they can feel quite random, especially if they're just the scraps rather than, you know, when it's newspaper clippings, it's much easier to kind of pull a narrative together from scrapbooks.
But when it's just random scraps, you're kind of. they're harder to read.But they some of them have different functions.So they might commemorate kind of artistic experimentation, they might express professional identity.
So it's a really great series of scrapbooks that I looked at in St.Andrews in Scotland, which relate to the McIntosh family.And William Carmichael McIntosh is a marine biologist at the University of St.Andrews.And his
sister makes a whole series of scrapbooks basically dedicated to his career. Which feels, it's a little sad, I think, but they're beautiful books.
And I think of that as her kind of creativity and her kind of archiving process being very important and vital in how we understand Macintosh's legacy.But those kind of self archiving practices are really interesting as well.
And yeah, there are so many scrapbooks around.If you go to basically the research library, they will have hundreds. And most of them are unpublished.A lot of them are in really bad shape.They crumble in your hands as you read through them.
And as I said, a lot of them are very difficult to kind of read as objects.So they, they're fascinating.
And they reflect a very particular set of interests of an individual at a particular moment in time, but often we can't kind of trace those histories.So yeah, scrapbooks are really intriguing forms for me.
Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial.No, no, no, no, no, no, don't, don't, don't, no.I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these.
I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month.How are there still people paying two or three times that much?I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here.Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready.
$45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month.New customers on first three month plan only.Taxes and fees extra.Speeds low or above 40 gigabytes.See details.
With Uber Reserve, good things come to those who plan ahead.Family vacay?Reserve your ride as soon as you book your flights.To all the planners, now you can reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance.See Uber app for details.
So I want to bring us to another case study that I thought was so interesting.Can you tell us about John Bingley Garland and his blood book?
Yes, this is probably my favorite collage of all time.And it's definitely my favorite example in the book.This is a really large kind of elephant folio size book.So it's a big old thing.
It's a scrapbook that's given by John Bingley Garland to his daughter in 1854.And Garland is British by birth, but he moves to Newfoundland in the 19th century.He's invested in the booming fish trade that was around at the time.
And yeah, we don't really know much about him.
But we have this incredible object and it's about the blood book in an interview because you can never do it justice with words like, please do go and look at an image of it because it's completely entrancing and wild as an object.
And I remember when I first saw it in the archive at the Harry Ransom Centre, I was literally blown away, like I just could not articulate what I was looking at.
But essentially it's a book whose every inch is covered with religious scenes and symbols, there's printed images all over all its pages and architectural details and these are
seem to be floating in space, but they're supported by flowers and snakes which writhe around the sort of central structures of the images.His handwriting, which is mostly from biblical verses, literally fills every single space of the page.
So it's a very intense kind of visual image.And then it gets its name, The Blood Book, from these sort of very languid drips of blood, which sort of pour from every surface throughout.So it's a very compelling image.
And again, very hard to read as a whole and to get a sort of a comprehensive grasp of because it is so dense even as an object.
It would take you a day to trace all of the textual components on a single page, let alone starting to trace all of the individual engravings.So there's, there's definitely more work that I'm going to be doing on that on that book.
But yeah, it's interesting, particularly because it ends up being part of Evelyn Waugh's collection of Victoriana.So There's a, it has a really interesting provenance history as well, but it's an incredible, incredible book.
And I hope we find more Bingley Garland collages.A couple have come on the market more recently.And yeah, I just, I hope there's a huge treasure trove of them out there.
So do I. Really, it's so cool.And it feels, I don't know, it feels like strangely modern in a way.Yeah, with all the blood, you know, it's just sort of like metal.It's like very cool.
I can't imagine how his daughter was feeling and thinking when she received it.
But yeah, and it's a kind of wedding gift as well.So people yeah, I think there's definitely something.It's like that metal is a good way of arching.
Okay, so getting into the 20th century, what should we know about collage and surrealism?
Maybe a useful follow on point, actually, because you said that it feels very modern.And actually, a lot of 19th century collages have a kind of surreal feel, particularly those made with photographic elements at the end of the century.
There's an album in the V&A by Kate Goff, and she does these compositions which are almost sort of Alice in Wonderland-esque.
in which she has landscapes featuring ducks and birds and flowers and which all have the sort of faces replaced with photographs of her friends, but just their heads.
And this creates an incredibly sort of interesting and very surreal form of representation.
It's playful, but it feels in lots of ways like it anticipates work by some surrealists who use collage and specifically Victorian lithographs and prints to make collage in this very sort of surreal manner.
So I do wonder if there is more kind of correspondence between those than we know. But yeah, surrealists use collage as part of their attempts to sort of create different kinds of realities, I would say.
A really important example is Max Ernst's collage novels, In Semaine du Bon Temps.And again, there's no kind of linear narrative necessarily, but there are themes, really important themes that go throughout that work around kind of
anti-Catholicism, anti-establishment.And yeah, he uses that sort of violent decapitation of images and giving people new heads and things like that, that we see in Goff's work as well.They're, I guess, two very different ends.
But I think it's interesting that people like Ernst, like Pauline Boaty, like Peter Blake, all start using Victorian imagery in the production of art that feels very modern, I think as a way of sort of demonstrating the importance of some of those legacies.
So, yeah, I think Surreal College is interesting because it's not necessarily
a complete innovation, but I think there's an interesting continuation in part of a group of practices which are initially pioneered by Victorian women and that feels very cool to me.
It's like a new way of thinking about that material.Absolutely.Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between punk music and collage?
I thought that this was like very surprising when I was first reading and then I was like, oh no, of course this makes complete sense.I just would have never thought of this.
Yeah, so the last chapter in the book deals with basically collage and forms of resistance and kind of reaction.And, you know, multiple theorists have characterized collage in this way.
They talk about it as being disruptive, that it interrogates kind of boundaries and binaries, that it's interruptive, right, because it dislocates and disentangles.
So Colin is a really good way of sort of representing social tensions and representing, yeah, a kind of a rejection of societal norms.
And from the 1960s onwards, we really see collage starting to get used for those aims, although there are historical examples as well.
But so as a result, it makes a lot of sense that punk as a movement, which is so invested in the aesthetics of this juncture, ripping, destruction, all of those, yeah, all of those kind of visual cultures, that we associate with punk.
So the kind of DIYness of it, and I haven't really mentioned this yet, but that's one of the things that the book is interested in, is sort of collage as a more democratic form, something which can be done at home, something which can be, you know, photocopied and replicated in the form of themes.
And that fits really well with the kind of punk, yeah, rejection and subversion of the establishment and who gets to speak, I guess.
One of the artists I talk about in that section is Linda Sterling, who does these incredible works, which like they feature on front covers of some albums.
The Buzzcocks 1977 single Orgasm Addict is one, and she makes this incredible collage of a nude woman with her arms outstretched and her head is replaced by, I think it's an iron, and I think, and it's part of a series of works by her which take
sort of catalogue-esque representations of household goods and then append them to pornographic forms.
And there's a really interesting correlation there that's drawn between kind of mass consumables and the way in which women's bodies have been consumed. And then that becomes a sort of part of the story that I tell in that chapter.
But yeah, I think collage as a statement, as a form of resistance, as a kind of activism is really important.
So we've sort of already touched on this, but you give such wonderful, so many wonderful examples of what you call craftivism at the end of the book.
So I was wondering if you'd like to talk about that a little bit more, maybe spotlight one of those examples.
Yeah, I mean, again, this relates to sort of what I've just been talking about, but that capacity of collage to mount critique is really, really important.And craftivism has become a really potent way of doing that.
The object that comes to mind is, of course, the AIDS Memorial quilt, which is, I think, technically the biggest work of art in the world.
It's huge and you can go, if you go to the project's website, you can go and see a kind of digital version of the quilt and you can zoom in and look at individual panels and it really does have a kind of global significance.
It was the idea of an activist, Cleve Jones, and he encouraged individuals who were walking as part of a 1985 march commemorating Harvey Milk to write names of those who died.
from AIDS and related complications on a series of signs and their form, the fact that they looked like a patchwork quilt essentially inspires this current project.
And again, what I think is so interesting about the quilt is that it works on these two scales.One is
this humongous object that stretched, one time it was displayed at the Capitol and stretched across huge amounts of that space, and which really symbolizes as a whole, the gargantuan losses that the AIDS epidemic represented and caused.
And then when you go much closer to it and look at it on an individual level, you're seeing lives touched by AIDS on a very personal level.The panels get made by family members, by friends, by lovers, relatives, whatever.
And each is this really potent visual representation of that individual, of what they were invested in, of their interests, their personalities.And yeah, it's an incredible object.
And I think, yeah, you know, to have it all in one museum one day would be incredible.
So sort of winding down, I wanted to know, like, what would you like listeners to do with what they learned from your book?
Yeah, this is a really good question.I think my aim with the book is to think about why we have that urge to stick stuff together.
Like, what is it about combining and bringing materials together and placing things in juxtaposition to create new meanings?Why is that so human?Why is it so recognizable?Why is it something that we still do?I mean, I made collages as a kid.
I scrapbooked, I made little shell work things.What is it about that that's so, if not universal, then certainly meaningful across great moments of time and space?
And then secondly, I think I want to advocate for the potential of not necessarily counter histories, but histories that are more porous,
more flexible, more dynamic, and without over claiming the kind of significance of how all of these things relate together, thinking about what do I gain when I do think about that in this way?
Like, I wouldn't, as I said earlier, I would never say that all of these things are the same kind of thing.But I think we gain a lot when we think about these kinds of things in conversation together.
So, yeah, I guess I agitate for sort of more porous histories of art and craft and everything else.
Thank you.OK, so last question.What are you working on next and where can our listeners find you and your work?
So working on a couple of things, one of which is a trade book about fatness and visual culture.And the other thing which is more directly related is a more kind of academic book about collage and ways of knowing.
So understanding the world and it's a kind of exploration of that side of the book, but in more detail.So yeah.And you can find me for my sins.I'm still on X. I don't know how long that will last.
But on Instagram, I'm at FreyaGalilee.Great.Thank you so much again, Freya, for being here today.It was wonderful to read your book and to chat with you.Thank you so much.It was a real pleasure to reflect on the process.
Sign in
