Since the ‘Merz’ pictures of Kurt Schwitters, the process and aesthetics of collage has been recognised as being analogous with the character and dilemmas of our modern condition. The way that it aims to make a coherent sense of our world using recombined fragments seems to be particularly relevant again today.

It is this capacity that I am exploring in my current work, both as a means to engage with the growing panoply of ‘dilemmas’ that our culture seems to be facing, and also to hopefully find a way forwards that I feel is positive, relevant and sustaining.

The works here are a result of this endeavour. Created during the last four years, their inspirations range widely. But in terms of utilising an aesthetic process to better understand the above dilemmas, they are all about the same thing - how we generate meaning through our embodied perceptions.

Insights arising from this activity are also sketched out below under the overarching idea of ‘Collage Logic’.

Collage Logic

The following polemic gives an account of the phenomenon I have come to term ‘Collage Logic’. I make no attempt to describe its history here, beyond wishing to note that its qualities are perhaps exactly those one would expect to arise from the growth of an increasingly materially and individually obsessed culture - a culture with an increasing desire for novelty over continuity, of repurchase and replacement over repair, and where the quantity of  information now overwhelms our ability to track its claims. When one lives in a culture that prefers a ‘virtual life’ as way to escape the fears that a physically embodied ‘real life’ might expose it to, Collage Logic becomes inevitable.

Collage Logic is on the rise and is becoming our prevalent way of ‘thinking’!

In ‘Traditional Logic’ there is a connection between the components of the narrative or rhetoric - each contention relates to and builds upon the previous one resulting in a reasoned argument. As a result, its validity can be analysed in terms of the strength of coherency between its components. But in the world of Collage Logic things are different. Meaning is derived merely by placing one concept next to another without the need for a reasoned connection. Instead, its meanings arise aesthetically through the spatial relations and juxtapositions of fragments rather than from the linear ‘cause and effect’ narrative building of classical reasoning. In Collage Logic validity is a matter of personal preference based upon the seductiveness of a surface image, it is the antithesis of traditional logic.

In its place Collage Logic offers inferred but unsubstantiated conclusions derived from adjacency. Disturbingly, these are what now pass for thinking in much of our modern culture. In conversation, adverts, social media, entertainment and political rhetoric alike, it is now deemed acceptable and sufficient to place one concept next to another and not have to prove the connection.  Advocates of traditional reasoning justifiably decry its spread, but we are already swamped by its extent, and attempts to ‘unpick and reorder’ things in order to reveal a truth that can be retrospectively verified are already impossible. Collage Logic is already ahead of us, overwhelming any attempts to manage its growth. Its very nature negates the possibility of a rear-guard action.

However, despite these problems, it seems to me that Collage Logic may also offer us something positive - a truth behind the problematic illusions of identity and selfhood that we cling to. Are we really the coherent and rationally driven consciousnesses that we like to believe? Is there really an unbroken continuity from our past to ourselves? Before the growth of Collage Logic, were there not equally intractable problems arising from the inertia and dualism within our previous systems of thinking?

Collage Logic stands not only as an analogue for our contemporary culture but also as an analogue of perception and cognition itself. It is perhaps a more authentic account of our thinking mode than the polarising narratives of rationality or irrationality can provide.

The conundrum of Collage Logic is therefore timely, eloquent and potentially therapeutic. It is a problem and yet also entices us with an alternative means to come to terms with contemporary life.

If the appearance of Collage Logic is one of juxtaposed elements and implied conclusions, then the process of Collage Logic is one of construction (and potentially repair) - it is essentially generative and, like ourselves, it is made from fragments broken away from their origins and rejoined in a quest for a new wholeness.

Akin to the art of Kintsugi, collage recombines what has failed or broken into something that is complete, new and previously unthinkable. Like the art of architecture, collage relies upon tectonics and the cumulative significance of adjacent components as they build towards a unified whole. In both cases it is a physical as much as an abstract endeavour, and in all cases the resultant whole (gestalt) is always greater than the sum of its parts. As a result the successful assimilations of Collage Logic always equate to growth rather than just the accumulation of parts.

The process of Collage Logic therefore opens up unforeseen pathways. When the playful explorations of bringing two foreign fragments together triggers our aesthetic sensibility we feel the urge to pursue it towards the new whole it implies. In the creative process this occurs again and again in a cascade of self sustaining growth.

So not only is the process of Collage Logic fast and flexible, but its open ended nature has the capacity to lead us - to be self-directing even. One gives up on ‘making sense’ in order to allow a ‘new sense’ to emerge.

Used positively, Collage Logic is therefore both carefree play and considered craft. Its process allows us to remain in the zone of aesthetic receptivity, oscillating between creator and spectator. It can be a game of enquiry where aesthetic concerns yield outputs with insight and direction.

Ultimately Collage Logic can actually be a form of contemplative thinking, relying more upon implication than explication, and leading at times to a depth of insight that classical reasoning cannot reach. As such, Collage Logic is perhaps the paradoxical tool for our times. Depending on who wields it, it is both the curse and the cure.

Tony Aldrich 2022