From February through May 2017, Luxembourg & Dayan will present The Ends of Collage, an exhibition that unfolds across three platforms, each offering a different perspective from which to review the medium of collage and its legacies. In New York the exhibition is dedicated to some of the technical preconditions of collage (variety of cuts, masks and windows, image manipulations and the notion of ‘edge’). In London, the exhibition shifts the focus towards some of the major themes that characterise the medium (fantasy, the domestic sphere, dismemberment of the social or private body, and the mobility of images). The third platform takes place on the pages of a printed publication, edited by Yuval Etgar, the curator of the exhibition, which brings together various theoretical motivations that precipitated the emergence of collage at the beginning of the twentieth century along with those that expanded the medium beyond its traditional limits with the emergence of digital cultures in the late 1970s.
The title chosen for the exhibition, The Ends of Collage, refers both literally and metaphorically to the place where collage ful ls its calling — at the ends or edges of pictures and fragments, where separate worlds come together or break apart from one another.
But it also suggests an historical paradigm, where collage is considered as a medium that existed in the so called ‘age of mechanical reproduction’ and has now been overcome by the new logic of the digital age. The curator Yuval Etgar, a doctoral candidate in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, states: “In a time where the term ‘cut and paste’ refers more often to allegorical and digital operations than to the use of scissors and glue, it seems imperative to go back and examine the technical invention that lies on the historical seam between pictures and images, between manual craft and the mediated reality of our time.”
The book The Ends of Collage includes writings by Elza Adamowicz, Louis Aragon, Jean (Hans) Arp, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Douglas Crimp, Max Ernst, Yuval Etgar, Clement Greenberg, Hannah Höch, Sherrie Levine, Groupe Mu, Craig Owens, Christine Poggi, Richard Prince, Martha Rosler, Ali Smith, John Stezaker, Brandon Taylor and Herta Wescher.
Luxembourg & Dayan will be hosting two symposiums on the legacies of collage in the digital age throughout the period of the exhibition. Speakers include David Campany, Ali Smith, Elizabeth Price, Linder, and John Stezaker among others.
PRESS CONTACT
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