Collage is now the language of teenagers says Charlie White, an LA-based artist whose essay, "Cut and Paste," is featured this month in Artforum. Charlie traces the history of collage from the turn of the last century into the digital age, noting that a culture built on mash-ups and re-mix must understand collage not as a radical or political tactic but as a sensible way to handle information overload. But is it just that? Charlie points to a site called Polyvore, which allows users to snip images - of cool clothes - and recontextualize them in new ways - as cool outfits - and claims that rather than inspiring contemplation, the site is all about consumption. He goes on to argue that culture has shifted dramatically toward the realm of the teen, adding that "nothing illustrates this better than the transformation of collage, where one might argue that 14 is the new 40, due to the embrace of levity in the face of tragedy, self over society, and desire over discontent." Charlie lists a series of examples that support the idea that collage has become juvenile, but then counters with a series of artworld explorations of collage that redefine the practice for a technological age. The essay is provocative and challenging, and includes a handy timeline. My question? Why do we still call it "cutting" and "pasting" in some nostalgic reference to scissors, paper and stickiness? Without that linkage, would we understand digital collage differently?
Subscribe to Blur + Sharpen's feed.
Interesting post Erin. My problem with Polyvore is that people can sample from my artwork on flickr without permission and they have. On flickr there is a discussion "Polyvore Still Stealing Images" with 124 comments from flickr members.
Polyvore is about consuming other people's work to create a collage without credit or permission by a group that sees nothing wrong in copying and pasting. What does this say about the thinking of the younger set when they see Shepard Fairey using an AP photograph with a credit to the original photographer? And when does this cross over to the written word? Is it okay to build off another person's work? It is another change in public behavior that the internet has changed.
As teens we all thought we were coming up with it for the first time, no? I still remember in the mid 1980s hitting play on the boombox tape player with Tears of a Clown by the English Beat. An adult neighbor in our condo complex said, hey that's Smokey Robinson's song. I had no idea what he was talking about.
Thanks, Holly, for directing us to Charlie's post in Artforum and for raising the anachrony of using cut-and-paste to describe digital mashups and recombination. I don't have any problem with the kind of appropriation and transformation enabled by sites like Polyvore. I think it's fair to say that if every teenager had to get written permission for every snippet of every image they wanted to put in a digital scrapbook, there would be no benefit to the person who posted the image on flickr and the thinking of the younger set would be that old people should stop being so uptight and acknowledge that creativity *always* builds on the past. This type of transformation is at the heart of fair use and it makes both legal and logical sense: no harm is done, no profits are made and culture and creativity are enriched, albeit in some small way. Anyone who posts images on flickr without selecting a Creative Commons license that at least allows for non-commercial reuse is holding on to a view of creativity and intellectual property that is far more anachronistic than mere "cutting-and-pasting."
The unfortunate part of the Polyvore.com website, is that it encourages stealing other artists' work, provides the tools to download images, mangle artwork, delete sources, remove watermarks, and then it claims that all the collages (sets) created by their members become the property of Polyvore. This is completely against all copyright law in the USA and abroad.
You can request your artwork be removed from their site, but them make that as difficult as possible. You would have to search their site daily to catch all the copyright violations. They keep your images in their library even after you have requested they stop.
And this is not a non-profit, hobby scrap-booking website for teenagers. It is a for profit website intended to get teens to consume, with kickbacks coming from the fashion websites linked to the clothing images.
Search Google for "polyvore" and "copyright" for links to the beginnings of what will be a long legal battle between artists and copyright violators.