Fragments and collages

 Actor portraying Kurt Schwitters 

“Everything had collapsed anyway, and new things had to be created from the fragments” 

Narrator 
The artworks in the Fredriksen collection can, roughly speaking, be assigned to the field of “global contemporary art” – art that circulates between biennials, art fairs, museums, auction houses and major international galleries. 

It's interesting how a lot of this art, even though it addresses current topics, uses modernist techniques that are about a century old. Especially collage. 

Mark Bradford’s Gatekeeper, for example, is a scab-like décollage built up from layer upon layer of newspapers, comics, maps and other leftover material that the artist has found lying around on the streets of Los Angeles.  

Using a sander and a high-pressure cleaner, Bradford has “excavated” the motif from this paper pulp. The result is a kind of subway map of the lives of the urban poor in the big cities from which he samples the material. 

His method has been compared to the Merz collages of the German modernist artist Kurt Schwitters, quoted earlier.  

In the 1920s, Schwitters trawled the streets of his bombed-out hometown of Hanover for tram tickets, leaflets, posters, and other printed waste, which he pasted together to create new compositions.  

Bradford’s terrain is completely different – structural racism and urban poverty as inscribed in the city landscape. But the impulse, the use of materials, and the technique is undoubtedly related to Schwitters. 

Another example seen here, is Sarah Sze’s Night Flight… 

Night Flight is an image that, from a distance, kind of reminds you of a laptop dropped on the floor, resulting in dead pixels shooting through the screen.  

Up close, however, you see that the pixel clusters are dark areas in hundreds of photographs of sunsets, torn out of magazines, and scattered across the surface - a bit like jpeg files scattered across the desktop screen of a computer.  

Sze has said that she is inspired by the Russian Constructivists, an avant-garde movement that developed photomontage, in which photographic fragments were cut, assembled, and reworked into new compositions. She particularly highlights their ability to freeze movement and intensity in a still image. 

But... why have these modernist principles and techniques been rediscovered by artists in the global contemporary field…? 

This exhibition emphasizes that the answer is different for every artist and reveals itself differently in each work. 

A more general explanation may be that some of the ideological tendencies that collage opposed in the 1920s have once again gained traction.  

Collage made it possible to assemble fragments into diverse and complex images. And, these complex images stood in sharp contrast to the fixed ideas about gender, ethnicity, nation, and culture that characterized the early 20th century - ideas that certain voices in today’s polarized present seem once again drawn to.