Beyond Fragmentation: Collage as Feminist Strategy in the Arts

Author(s): GWEN RAABERG

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal , September 1998, Vol. 31, No. 3,
THE INTERARTS PROJECT: Part Three: Representing Women (September 1998), pp. 153-
171
Published by: University of Manitoba

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44029815

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 Although cultural debates regarding the possibility of a postmodern

oppositional art tend to be critical of collage, feminist artists in a variety

of media have frequently chosen this mode. Focusing on concrete exam-

ples, this essay attempts to provide the historical and theoretical frame-

work needed to understand the oppositional nature of feminist collage.

Beyond Fragmentation:
Collage as Feminist Strategy
in the Arts

GWEN RAABERG

Throughouttionary
tionary art the movements
art movements 20thtocentury,
have laid claim collage, have a laid succession claim to of collage, revolu-
assuming special rights to the form and avowing its special
powers. In the contemporary arts, collage is so prevalent
that it is sometimes considered synonymous with post-
modernism. Significantly, during the last three decades,
feminist artists have particularly been attracted to this
mode; indeed, the art critic Lucy Lippard has gone so far as
to claim that collage is a predominant aesthetic in the fem-
inist arts (25). Current debates regarding the possibility of
truly oppositional art, however, often involve a critique of
collage, questioning assumptions about its revolutionary
"edge" and implicating it in concerns about the political
limitations of any art embedded in postmodern culture.
Allying feminist arts and agendas with collage would thus
seem to pose a number of problems: insofar as the feminist
arts assume a political stance and are directed toward a cri-
tique of contemporary culture, how can the practice of
feminist collage be squared with the charge that collage is
symptomatic of postmodern cultural fragmentation and
that it is incompatible with art as political critique?

Mosaic 31/3 0027-1276-98/153018$02.00© Mosaic

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154 Mosaic 31/3 (September 1998)

As I see it, what is needed to address this issue is an investigation of feminist

art in various media, with a view to providing an adequate historicizing and
theorizing of the development of feminist collage strategies as oppositional
art. In doing so, it is important to refrain from claiming that collage in itself
has any unique power as cultural critique, or that women have any essential
relationship to collage. There is, in my opinion, no basis for equating a partic-
ular aesthetic form or strategy with any particular effect; the relationship
between artistic object and audience is too complex to presume a given effect
or meaning, and interpretation is in continual process as it is constructed
through artistic strategies, critical theories, and cultural institutions.
Furthermore, it would be naive to invoke an essentialist basis for a relation-
ship between women or minorities and any particular art form or critical art.
At the same time, one can argue that artists who are culturally marginal may
find certain strategies particularly useful in representing that position, and
evidence of this can be found in an analysis of the theories and practices of
particular visual and verbal artists.
In order to pursue this investigation, I will begin with a brief overview of
the general evolution of collage and the critical issues that have been raised
concerning its oppositional value, including arguments and counterargu-
ments. I will then trace the development of feminist theories of collage and
explore collage techniques used by feminist artists in a variety of media:
Miriam Schapiro (visual modes); Ntozake Shange (verbal/dance); Barbara
Kruger (image/word); Kathy Acker (verbal modes), and Yvonne Rainer (film).
In concluding, I will foreground the major implications of the work of these
artists to elaborate historical and theoretical perspectives on the practice of
feminist collage as oppositional art.

Crollage had long been a technique in the crafts and popular arts in both
Western and other cultural traditions when, in the second decade of the 20th
century, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque turned to this technique to pursue
Cubist experiments in dismantling traditional realistic representation, using
found materials and assembling fragmented elements through a method of
juxtaposition. At that point, as art historians have declared and incessantly
reiterate, collage became a "fine art." Guilliaume Apollinaire wrote enthu-
siastically about collage in his 1913 book, The Cubist Painters ; Aesthetic
Meditations, and developed it as a Cubist poetic technique in his Calligrammes
of 1913-16. The Futurists also turned to collage at this time, F. T. Marinetti
claiming special powers for collage in manifesting the Futurists' idea of the

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 Gwen Raaberg 155

dynamic, technological new century, as well as for presenting their militaristic

political agenda. In Les mots en liberté futuristes, Marinetti advances his notion
of free-word poetry, which developed in the works of the Futurist artists into a
new visual-verbal form of collage, the free-word picture. During the First
World War, the Dadaists, and later the Surrealists, seized upon collage as an
artistic-literary strategy with which to mount their attack on Western culture.
Developing out of Cubist impulses toward aesthetic fragmentation and dis-
continuity, collage, in the hands of the Dadaists and Surrealists, was directed
toward cultural critique and psychological exploration. The collage technique
of abruptly juxtaposing and linking disparate fragments was viewed as a
means of undermining conventional associations and shocking the viewer or
reader into a perception of a new reality - social, political and psychological,
as well as aesthetic.

Insofar as the term refers to a general technique, collage has been a major
mode in all the arts in the 20th century. Initially referring to works of visual art
in which various materials are glued to a flat surface, collage has become a
term which not only often covers a range of techniques - including assem-
blage, photomontage, and the manipulation of found objects, as Diane
Waldman notes in her survey of the mode (8) - but also has become widely
used to refer to techniques in literature, music, video, film, and the other arts
that assemble fragmented elements or portions of prior works and juxtapose
them in a discontinuous manner. In its various manifestations, collage is gen-
erally considered to have fundamentally changed 20th-century theories and
practices in the arts. Because it counters the principal modernist aesthetic
tenets of autonomy and unity, and because it is so widely practiced in the con-
temporary arts, collage is often viewed as the art form especially characteristic
of postmodernism.
Assessments of the revolutionary quality and oppositional potential of col-
lage, however, have been both positive and negative, ranging from declarations
that it is the premier form of avant-garde art to assertions that the form is
merely symptomatic of a fragmented culture. As Peter Burger explains in
Theory of the Avant-Garde , the historical avant-garde (the Dadaists and
Surrealists) conceived of collage as the most effective strategy for subverting
the dominant Western tradition and effecting a new consciousness. As he sees
it, however, while collage strategies did serve to undermine the modernist con-
ception of autonomous art - art as a privileged imaginative enclosure, disin-
terested in and disconnected from social realities - the avant-garde's attempt
to create a politically oppositional art was ultimately a failure.

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156 Mosaic 31/3 (September 1998)

Fredric Jameson, like Burger, questions the possibility of a revolutionary

political art, but his argument arises out of his general suspicion of postmod-
ernism. In Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson
discusses the problems of manifesting a political art, given art's entanglement
in the commodity production of late capitalism and its position within, and
therefore lack of distance from, postmodern culture. He focuses his analysis
of the arts particularly on collage, viewed as "pastiche," which he considers the
dominant mode of postmodernism, "the well-nigh universal practice today"
(18), and which he views as symptomatic of the fragmentation, "schizophre-
nia" (referring to Lacanian notions of self, language, and meaning), and ahis-
toricism of postmodern culture. Jameson's critique of the arts, however, is
founded, as he concedes, upon his study of postmodern architecture (2). His
analysis thus focuses on mainstream art and on practices that juxtapose frag-
mented elements selected from styles throughout time, which he views as
combining fragments in a mode that disregards their historical context and
ruptures the links in the series of signifiers that constitute meaning, produc-
ing a schizophrenic "rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers" (26). It
should also be noted that Jameson's questioning of postmodern oppositional
art rests heavily on his argument that it is "our" position within late capitalist
culture that tends to preclude the "critical distance" essential for cultural cri-
tique (48). Although he acknowledges that "microgroups and 'minorities,'
women as well as the internal Third World, and segments of the external one
as well," occupy a position different from that of the "white and male-domi-
nated elites in the advanced countries" (318), he also insists that "micropoli-
tics" is a postmodern phenomenon, and he thereby interpolates feminism in
postmodernism.
Craig Owens, in considering the oppositional potential of postmodern art,
has criticized Jameson for focusing his analysis on mainstream postmodern
art rather than on art that self-consciously undertakes a cultural critique. He
notes also that Jameson's critical approach depends upon a concept of the
artist as working within culture in a largely unconscious manner, rather than
informed by theory, thus leaving to the critic the task of uncovering relation-
ships between the art work and culture (300, 307).
Like Jameson, Lippard considers collage to be "the core image of post-
modernity" (25), but in contrast to his approach and in line with Owens's
position, she focuses her analysis of postmodern art largely on the politically
self-conscious art of women and minorities, who develop their work through
the frames of feminist and multi-cultural theories and who are committed to

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 Gwen Raaberg 157

cultural critique. Rather than finding in collage a vacuous pastiche of discon-

nected fragments, Lippard views the "feminist collage aesthetic" as a means for
"putting things together without divesting them of their own identities," a
mode capable of projecting "a metaphor for cultural democracy" (209). She
finds a difference between the practice of fragmentation in the mainstream
postmodern arts and in the feminist arts, the latter exhibiting "a kind of 'posi-
tive fragmentation '....Collage is born of interruption and the healing instinct
to use political consciousness as a glue with which to get the pieces into some
sort of new order (though not necessarily as new whole , since there is no single
way out, nobody who's really got it all together'; feminist art is still an art of
separations)" (136, 168). Arguing then that the collage strategies of feminists
arise out of an awareness of their position as marginal in the dominant cul-
ture, she goes on to conclude that in itself "it is a collage experience to be a
woman artist or a sociopolitical artist in a capitalist culture" and, indeed, "fem-
inist identity is itself.. .a collage of disparate, not yet fully compatible parts."
Contemporary feminist artists and writers, therefore, have generally con-
ceived of collage not as symptomatic of failure or lack but as rife with possibil-
ities. Indeed, it is the feminist or minority marginal position, both within and
at the outside limits of dominant postmodern culture, which offers particular
possibilities for a double-visioned cultural critique. And it is collage, utilizing
both fragmentation and relational strategies, which has often been employed
to manifest this vision in the arts.

During the early years of the contemporary women's movement, Miriam

Schapiro recognized the possibilities of collage for feminist artists when she
coined the term "femmage" to describe a tradition of this kind in women's art.
In a 1978 essay entitled "Waste Not Want Not," Schapiro explains femmage as a
strategy, developed in the traditional women's art activities of handiwork and
crafts, which in the past had provided a felicitous method for women with lim-
ited access to the means and materials of the "fine arts" to create beautiful and
useful art. She notes that early femmagists, whose work was marked by collage
techniques of piecing together fragments, shared certain characteristics: they
saved and recycled materials, combining available materials, photographs,
printed matter, images, and texts into abstract and organic forms; they pro-
duced, for an audience of intimates, works that were both functional and aes-
thetic, that had reference to both private and public events, and that were often
subversive. Schapiro pointedly confronts the devaluation of women's art activ-
ities by refuting the misleading "information about the origins of collage"

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158 Mosaic 31/3 (September 1998)

generated by art historians and critics who had ignored the collages of
women, non-Western, and folk artists - "art when it is made by others' ' (2).
In a revised 1989 essay entitled "Femmage," Schapiro presents it as a strat-
egy by which contemporary women can gather together out of the fragments
of their cultural past an artistic tradition, a heritage and a technical procedure
in literary, musical, and plastic arts that feminists may draw upon for "aes-
thetic direction" (315). Femmage thus refers backward to the heritage of
women's traditional art activities and forward to contemporary feminist
artists who are reclaiming this legacy, asserting its value, and finding in it a
sense of continuity. Schapiro names among contemporary femmagists, Betye
Saar, Mimi Smith, Harmony Hammond, Faith Ringgold, Marybeth Edelson,
and herself, artists who "reshape artifacts from women's culture and give them
new voice" (296).
Schapiro's own art work during the 1970s and early 80s was dedicated in
large part to this project of femmage as reclamation. In 1971 Schapiro, a
Canadian trained in the United States, began teaching at the California
Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles and initiated, with the artist Judy Chicago,
what was known as the Feminist Art Program. Out of the interaction between
faculty and students in this program came the idea for Womanhousey an old
mansion in downtown Hollywood that was reworked to present the artists'
ideas and feelings regarding womanhood. An unprecedented collaborative
undertaking in the feminist arts, Womanhouse was a collage of installations by
the participating artists. Schapiro and Sherry Brody duplicated in miniature
this larger collage in their contribution, Dollhouse (1972; see Fig. 1), whose
tiny rooms - furnished with an ironic mix of cozy comforts, a scorpion, an
alligator, and a Magritte painting of ten men peering into the kitchen win-
dow - represent "fantasies of faith, fear, and anguish" ("Waste Not" 5).
For Schapiro, femmage can transform the objects of daily life into "a state-
ment of extensive proportions" capable of raising women's consciousness
("Waste Not" 16); her Wonderland (1983) is an example of this undertaking.
The work, created following a trip to Australia, assembles objects found there,
fragments of women's traditional needlework - quilts, potholders, aprons,
and mementos bearing words, images, dates, and initials - in a brilliantly col-
ored and complex pattern of diagonal lines pressing inward that binds in mul-
tiple frames a central image of a subserviently bowing housewife in her
kitchen. Bread (1977) is a femmage that also transforms women's daily work.
Reclaiming an object from the past, a crocheted bread cover, Schapiro
imprints its design with the word "Bread" onto a plaster ground, molding it

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 Gwen Raaberg 159

Fig. 1. Miriam Schapiro and Sherry Brody. The Dollhouse (c. 1972).
Courtesy of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Courtesy of Steinaum Krauss Gallery, New York

and thereby retrieving, framing, and revitalizing the daily work (both bread-
making and crocheting) of earlier women as sustenance for contemporary
artistic work. This piece is one of a series of ten titled Anonymous Was a
Woman , a phrase, Schapiro notes, from Virginia Woolf, who spoke of the
"loose, drifting material of life" that she wanted to see "sorted and coalesced
into a mold transparent enough to reflect the light of our life and yet aloof as
a work of art" ("Femmage" 306). Femmage was fundamentally directed
toward that goal.
As a women's tradition in the arts and as an oppositional strategy, fem-
mage provided an important basis for the practice of a new feminist art. It was
a significant revisionist tactical move for feminist artists in the 1970s because
it confronted male power in the arts, exposing the politics of aesthetics, which

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160 Mosaic 31/3 (September 1998)

had devalued women's traditional art work and which continued to marginal-
ize women's art. It was also important in focusing the work of a group of
women artists, diverse racially and ethnically, on a strategy that connected
them to a matrilineal artistic legacy and to each other. In her 1989 essay,
Schapiro attempts to provide a conceptual framework for the contemporary
practice of femmage in the notion of "women's culture" (296). She views
women's art activities and the femmage tradition as developing out of the
experiences of women's lives, fragmented by domestic and nurturing duties
and limited by patriarchal cultural privileges, and to support the notion of a
"women's culture," Schapiro includes examples of femmage from a variety of
times, places, classes, races, and ethnic groups. Her general concept, however,
tends at moments to be essentialist and universalizing, suggesting that women
as a group create art in a particular way and neglecting to differentiate between
women. The gesture was inclusive, but inclusiveness without differentiation is
problematic in the light of more recent critiques by women of color regarding
issues of white feminist hegemony and the necessity to acknowledge differ-
ences as well as similarities between women of various races, classes, and eth-
nic groups. Thus in her essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," Alice
Walker draws attention to the need to recognize a special African-American
"womanist" tradition, a heritage of art activities that shares many of the fem-
mage characteristics of fragmentation and piecing together, but a heritage that
must be comprehended in its own, quite different, cultural context.
Arising out of this African-American woman's tradition, the work of
Ntozake Shange provides a notable example of performance collage. Early in
the 1970s, Shange began working out of an impulse, similar to yet completely
separate from the femmagists, focused on both asserting a feminist voice and
reclaiming an African-American artistic heritage. Referring especially to her
work with the Women's Studies Program at Sonoma State College in
Califormia, Shange credits "the development of my sense of the world, myself,
8c women's language" (xiv) to the rise at this time of the contemporary North
American feminist movement: "Unearthing the mislaid, forgotten, 8c/or mis-
understood women writers, painters, mothers, cowgirls, 8c union leaders of
our pasts proved to be both a supportive experience 8c a challenge not to let
them down, not to do less than.. .our mothers, from Isis to Marie Laurencin,
Zora Neale Hurston to Käthe Kollwitz, Anna May Wong to Calamity Jane"
(xv). During this period, Shange was also in contact with writers of the Third
World Women's Collective and with the African heritage of music and dance
as explicated by Raymond Sawyer and Ed Mock, and by Halifu Osumare,

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 Gwen Raaberg 161

whose troupe, "The Spirit of Dance," presented this heritage from its origins in
Western Africa to contemporary street dance.
These reclaimed traditions give form to Shange's "choreopoem for colored
girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf ' a work that was
performed first in a San Francisco bar and eventually on Broadway. The piece
is a collage of African-American music, dance, and language, drawing on the
rich resources of jazz, reggae, oral narration, and conversational speech. The
work is also a collage of the voices and perspectives of seven African-American
women characters, whose lives encompass a full range of experiences and
emotions, love and violence, joy and tragedy. The work as performance does
not present an action, linear or episodic, but rather juxtaposes fragments of
various experiences and feelings, recounted by the performers who are distin-
guished mainly by the color of their dresses. These women are therefore dis-
tinct but are set in relationship through thematic reverberations in their
stories and through choreographed movement and dance, which physically
interconnects the circle of women. The printed text of the choreopoem is also
a collage, using a shortened form of spelling and a typography that juxtaposes
fragmented elements to emphasize shifts in the tone and intensity of the lan-
guage. Shange's poetic language manifests the sounds and rhythms of African-
American speech, giving voice to a "black girl's song": "closed in silence so
long / she doesn't know the sound of her own voice / ...she's half-notes scat-
tered..." (3). The African- American cultural critic, Michele Wallace, in her col-
lection of essays titled Invisibility Blues , finds in these lines an expression of
the arduous struggles of black feminist creativity.
Shange is only one of a number of feminist women of color, including
Maxine Hong Kingston and Cherrie Moraga, who in working out of multiple,
fragmented cultural traditions have found in collage a strategy for collecting
their heritages and connecting them to their own lives and to current political
and cultural concerns. These women of color expand the notion of a collage
aesthetic as conceived in femmage to a recognition of the importance of
multi-cultural traditions. They, too, find in collage a strategy for collecting
fragmented and unacknowledged women's traditions, but they enlarge the
capacity of collage to include and set in relationship fragments from multiple
perspectives and from diverse traditions and art forms.
As we begin to consider more recent examples of feminist collage, we
should note that in Schapiro's 1989 essay, she links her work to that of the next
generation of feminist artists, explaining that "femmage is also coming to
mean any deep concern with women's issues, values, and any ideas relating to

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162 Mosaic 31/3 (September 1998)

gender, language, and media as they illuminate who women are and how they
can redefine themselves in the light of deconstructing old mores, customs,
style, and patriarchal meaning" (296). Although in this way she acknowledges
the new deconstructive direction of feminist art and attempts to include
within the femmagist undertaking artists working in the 1980s, it is important
to recognize that this later art is based on different theories and directed
toward new goals. These feminists move on from femmage's fundamental pro-
ject of reclamation and revision, the first stage of feminism in the arts and
humanities generally, to an oppositional art whose strategies are specifically
designed to deconstruct patriarchal culture and the institutions that frame it.
A good example here is Barbara Krueger, whose visual- verbal art is con-
frontational, engaging directly in political criticism, and is informed by post-
structuralist as well as feminist theory. Her work reflects the understanding
that sign systems - both images and language - have the power to construct
identities. Interrogating the sign systems of contemporary media, especially
the representation of gender, Kruger deconstructs these representations and
discloses their relation to patriarchal power. Her work is dedicated to the fem-
inist goals of disrupting this power, of evoking political awareness, and assert-
ing agency. She uses collage strategies of fragmentation and discontinuity to
intervene in the seamless cultural representation of gender, appropriating
media images, reworking them through fragmentation, cropping, or place-
ment, and setting them in opposition to other images or language within the
frame of the work. A 1981 work, Untitled , presents a woman's face, idealized
and frozen into the features of a classical statue (see Fig. 2). Kruger's
untitled works are also known by the wording on the collage - in this case the
phrase Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face , which is positioned down the side of
the photograph in a manner that accosts the viewer, thereby deconstructing
this stereotypical media representation and disclosing the objectification of
women as constructed through the dominant male perspective. Such a work
draws on postmodern concepts of the "gaze" as institutionalized perspective,
the system of images and discourse through which subjects are constructed,
and on feminist film theory, which identifies the gaze of the camera as that of
male subjectivity constituting female as object.
Kruger skillfully works with two sign systems, images and language, pre-
senting them through strategies of opposition or conflict, within the work
itself between images or between words and image, and, more broadly,
between the work and the viewer and culture. An example of this strategy is her
1982 photo-collage Untitled ( You Are Not Yourself ), which forcefully juxtaposes

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 Gwen Raaberg 163

Fig. 2. Barbara Kruger. Untitled (c. 1982).

Courtesy of the Mary Boone Gallery, New York

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164 Mosaic 31/3 (September 1998)

and sets in opposition the large type of "you are / yourself" with the black cen-
ter of the work containing the small type of "not" and the shattered mirror
image of a woman. The work interrogates the social construction of gender by
sources outside the self, and at the same time, presents the pain of self-rejec-
tion and lack of agency. Kruger also develops the dialectical possibilities of col-
lage both to stage and to oppose a representation, as in the case of her
l98lUntitled ( You Are Seduced by the Sex Appeal of the Inorganic ). Here she
presents a romantically contrived image of a female's glove and a male's glove
holding hands, and simultaneously cites - in the affixed wording of the sub-
title - the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, which exposes the seductive
appeal of commodity culture in late capitalism as an insidious form of social
control. The work also deconstructs cultural representations of romantic love,
disclosed here as an obvious media construction of desire rather than as "nat-
ural" experiential ground.
Kruger effectively puts a range of collage strategies at the service of feminist
goals. The collapse of distinctions between "high" and "low" culture and the
open use of found objects, techniques first developed in collage, serve to fore-
ground her blatant appropriation of popular media images and stereotypical
gender representations. And confrontation - developed through the collage
strategy of abruptly juxtaposing images and texts that accost or disorient the
audience and pull them into a meaningful encounter with the work - is fun-
damental to her critical purposes and oppositional stance.

In the area of verbal texts, feminist writers also work within a deconstructive
mode of collage - for example, Kathy Acker, whose major texts were written in
the two decades preceding her death in 1997. Acker's work assumes a radically
postmodernist theoretical position that directs collage strategies toward the
deconstruction of hegemonic cultural representations and monological dis-
courses. Her strategies, like Kruger's, focus primarily on appropriating and
setting in opposition various cultural representations, but here it involves the
abrupt juxtaposition of shocking language and verbal imagery, especially that
with sexual content, to confront the reader. Since in her postmodern theoreti-
cal framework, meaning and identity are constructed through sign systems,
which are already in play, Acker directs her attention to fragmenting and
manipulating various cultural texts, purposefully juxtaposing "high" and
"low" literature to disclose the power systems that support both. Her position
not only attacks modernist concepts of literary autonomy and unity, but also
brings into question some earlier feminist notions of autobiographical writing

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 Gwen Raaberg 165

and artistic expression, which were based on essentialist notions of self as a

direct expression of experience in contrast to the current view of identity as a
mediated linguistic and social construction.
Acker's verbal collage "Dead Doll Prophecy," a 1994 revision of a 1990 work
entitled "Humility," is directed toward deconstructing dominant cultural per-
spectives and the power relations that support them. This narrative-essay
explores the theme of the cultural reproduction of texts and signs, and broadly
attacks traditional conceptions of literature - including authorship, "voice,"
creativity, originality, and boundaries between genres, prose and poetry, fact
and fiction - as well as the powerful economic institutions of copyright and
publication that support these conceptions. The narrative, which is frag-
mented into short, non-sequential pieces and interspersed with theoretical
and political commentary, enacts the difficulties of a dollmaker - "Capitol" -
and her "writer doll" as they deal with an incident in which the writer doll is
accused of plagiarism. The situation here is loosely based on Acker's own
experience - i.e., in an early work, Acker had reproduced several pages of a
novel by Harold Robbins, and when this came to the attention of his publisher
years later, she was threatened with a lawsuit and was pressured by her own
publisher to apologize. Acker's work characteristically uses textual appropria-
tion, often including pieces of writing from commercial novels and the popu-
lar media, in order to deconstruct cultural representations of gender and
sexuality. In self-consciously focusing "Dead Doll Prophecy" on an act of
appropriation, Acker not only makes clear her deconstructive strategy but also
exposes the institutions and discourses (economic, literary, and legal) that
function to keep dominant cultural constructions securely in place. In her nar-
rative-commentary, she points out that the appropriated text is "emblematic
of a certain part of American culture. What happened was that the sterility of
that part of American culture revealed itself. The real pornography. Clichés,
especially sexual clichés, are always signs of power or political relationships."
This explanatory prose is abruptly juxtaposed, verbally and typographically, to
a passage of narration immediately following, which in a strategy typical of
Acker's writing, represents sexuality in a blunt style (and bold print) that
assaults common media constructions of sexual desire: "BECAUSE SHE HAD
JUST GOTTEN HER PERIOD, CAPITOL MADE A HUGE RED SATIN PIL-
LOW CROSS THEN SMEARED HER BLOOD ALL OVER IT" (28).
In Acker's collage text, as in Kruger's art, appropriation and confrontation
are strategic elements of oppositional art. Acker's technique of juxtaposing
and forcing into relationship various fragments and conflicting elements -

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166 Mosaic 31/3 (September 1998)

contextually inappropriate modes (political commentary and narrative), dis-

parate, tenuously related contents, shocking pieces of language and verbal
imagery, and contrasting typography - is specifically calculated, as she notes,
to break into the "habitual nature of perception" (28) and to jolt the reader out
of comfortable patterns of reading. Because Acker's appropriations reproduce
sizable portions of the rhetoric of cultural constructions, however, the lan-
guage here is not as obviously deconstructed as are the images in Kruger 's art,
thereby opening Acker's work to the kind of criticism that Jameson made of
postmodern art - i.e., that the text is symptomatic and merely reproduces
postmodern culture. Acker nevertheless maintains that her writing, sometimes
described as strategic plagiarism, undermines the validity of the reproduced
cultural constructions and that the appropriated texts, "if deconstructed,
viewed in terms of context and genre, [become] signs of political and social
realities" (27-28).
Perhaps the most complex manifestations of collage as a feminist strategy
occur in multi-media forms, particularly in film. The films of director-writer
Yvonne Rainer, as Teresa de Lauretis points out in her Foreword to the film-
scripts, are "a distinguished exemplar" of contemporary art, which are "pro-
duced at the intersection of creative and critical practices - the avant-garde
and the women's movement, filmmaking and theories of representation and
spectatorship, performance art and psychoanalysis, autobiographical writing
and the critical study of culture...." Rainer, who began her career as a modern
dancer/choreographer and performance artist in the 1960s, has written and
directed experimental films since the 1970s. Her work brings into play the
range of collage strategies found in feminist artists and writers, elaborating
them through the complexities of film and directing them toward feminist
and egalitarian goals.
In Privilege , Rainer 's 1990 film, the ostensible theme, announced in the
opening sequences, is menopause and aging in women. But the topic opens
outward to become a wide-ranging critique of class, race, ethnicity, and sexual
identity, exploring those circumstances in which women with a "double differ-
ence" - i.e., gender plus any other status markers - are further marginalized
and oppressed and those circumstances in which young, middle-class, hetero-
sexual, white women submit to dominant patriarchal social structures to gain
privilege. Rainer's collage technique fragments sequences, abruptly juxtapos-
ing different camera angles and conflicting presentations of the action, and
repeatedly breaking into the development with oblique commentary and frag-
ments of other films.

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 Gwen Raaberg 167

Privilege focuses on an interview being conducted with a menopausal white

woman, in which she is recounting her life story as a young woman in New
York. The interviewer in the film is an African-American woman named
"Yvonne," and the camera, positioned just behind her, self-consciously situates
the audience to observe the interviewee - a member of the white, middle-class
majority - from Yvonne's minority perspective. We are never quite certain,
though, who is being interviewed, since the repeated shifts in time, place, and
personages create a jostling of identity and action. Although the white
woman's story is directly acted out at times, the narrative includes a discontin-
uous series of incomplete flashbacks and multiple perspectives, featuring
shifting identities, places, and times. In this way, we come to see identity and
personal history not as a unified entity or reified fact but as an open process,
continually in movement, a fragmentary assemblage of heterogeneous per-
spectives and interpretations.
The film is edited to present sequences that often contradict others or
repeat them with differences, problematizing any tendency to grant validity to
a single action or speech. Focusing on the issue of aging in women, the inter-
view is interspersed with fragments from documentary films about
menopause, in which male physicians (and a compliant woman psychiatrist)
expound on the "problem," describing the difficulties and diminished status of
post-menopausal women. The conflicts between the woman's self-presenta-
tion and the physicians' analyses of aging women offer a powerful tool for
deconstructing dominant representations. Through the juxtaposition of dif-
ferent yet similar presentations by "authorities," we recognize that the con-
struction of identity is influenced by incessantly reproduced images and
discourse. The objectivity presumed in documentary film technique and the
authority usually accorded physicians are exposed, and it becomes apparent
that institutionalized patriarchal perspectives and discourse have actively con-
structed the cultural conception of aging women. But we also come to under-
stand that identity is neither completely a social construction nor a
self-construction: although no person can simply construct an "identity" -
the woman's own narrative is full of contradictions - each of us does have the
power of agency and awareness. Rainer 's techniques of fragmentation and
juxtaposition work to open a space between the film and the cultural con-
struction in which viewers can begin to deconstruct power relations for them-
selves.

Rainer also develops a strategy that juxtaposes opposing perspectives and

camera angles, introducing the audience to different viewpoints capable of

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168 Mosaic 31/3 (September 1998)

deconstructing each other. In one sequence, a Puerto Rican woman - who in a

story narrated by the white woman is portrayed as a wife abused by her
"macho" husband - visibly assumes the appearance of the Hollywood stereo-
type, dressing in an exotic gown and elaborate headdress of fruit. In a reveal-
ing sequence that follows, the Puerto Rican woman metaphorically and
literally turns the table (and the camera) on the white woman, as she pointedly
observes an incident in the woman's early life - a dinner date with a promi-
nent, upper-middle class man - in which the young white woman was clearly
obsequious. Suddenly the complicity of the young white woman in a patriar-
chal system of privilege is disclosed. It is only in aging that the white woman
has moved to "the other side of privilege," a social and political position which,
like that of other women minorities, is even further from the centers of power.
The diverse perspectives prohibit the audience from constructing a totalized
narrative and a unified position from which to view the film, encouraging
viewers to participate in multiple perspectives and interpretations.
The film concludes with a sequence from the film's wrap party, a gathering
to celebrate completion of the film. Here we see each actor as another identity
in another situation, enacting other possible relationships than those por-
trayed previously, a number of which were in conflict. This scene serves as a
frame, functioning to heighten self-reflexivity and leading viewers to recog-
nize that the film - its various representations and our interpretations-is itself
a construction. The scene also serves as a coda, not a summation that totalizes
meaning but an addendum that portrays possibilities, the positive ways in
which people might, and on certain occasions do, relate to one another. Like
the film, the scene brings together in a relational field "different" (both
between and within) identities and diverse perspectives. Rainer's films are
fragmented and discontinuous, but they move well beyond notions of post-
modern collage as a collection of unrelated fragments. Her feminist collage
strategies are directed not only toward deconstructing dominant cultural rep-
resentations but also toward constructing new visions of social organization in
which we all are "others" capable of multiple perspectives and manifold rela-
tionships.

In the early years of the contemporary women's movement, feminists directed

their attention to retrieving and reclaiming a fragmented and disregarded
legacy in the arts. White women and women of color, sometimes together,
sometimes separately, undertook this quest for a usable heritage in their writ-
ing and art work. In seizing upon collage as a useful artistic and literary

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 Gwen Raaberg 169

strategy, the impulse was not to represent the fragmentation and discontinuity
of contemporary culture; rather, it was to re-collect those art works and activ-
ities already fragmented and abandoned by the dominant culture and to con-
struct a sense of continuity by relating them to contemporary artistic
activities. Femmage and similar collage strategies in feminist and minority arts
are recuperative, restorative, "a healing instinct," as Lippard suggests, a means
of reconnecting fragmented, marginalized objects, activities, and perspectives
and constructing a variety of women's traditions.
Since the 1980s, a number of women artists and writers have been self-con-
sciously working out of post-structuralist and increasingly sophisticated fem-
inist theories, developing works of collage in a deconstructive mode that are
more explicitly oppositional. These works similarly cannot be said to replicate
the fragmentation of postmodern culture; indeed, they do the opposite, for
their strategies are directed toward breaking into unitary, hegemonic cultural
constructions and toward questioning single-perspective, patriarchal repre-
sentations of women. These feminist collages are focused on deconstructing
dominant perspectives and discourses, and the institutions that frame and
support them, to disclose the political power relations of postmodern society.
Works of feminist collage created during the 1990s continue to deconstruct
cultural representations and discourses but also seek to expand their concerns
to include, along with gender issues, a full range of social, political, and cul-
tural concerns. In many works, we may find a reconstructive impulse, based
not on a totalizing perspective but on a collage strategy that utilizes fragmen-
tation, discontinuity, and dialectical oppositions to stage multiple, fluid rela-
tionships. Moving beyond a postmodernist emphasis on fragmentation that
results in a pastiche of "distinct and unrelated signifiers," these feminist
collages provide a mediating site that suggests new ways of connecting multi-
ple, open identities and perspectives in a multitude of possible relationships.
The feminist philosopher Sandra Harding, emphasizing that feminists
must remain sensitive to differences within gender, has pointed out that
although "we can't share each other's experiences... we can share the politics"
that arise from different experiences (qtd. in Lippard 271). As women of dif-
ferent classes, races, ethnic backgrounds, sexual identities, and ages share the
politics of the situation, then, they may also share oppositional and critical
strategies, in the arts as elsewhere. Thus, we find that a number of women
artists and writers with different experiences and different perspectives dis-
covered in collage certain strategic possibilities that they developed and put in
the service of a feminist oppositional art. Although we cannot conclude that

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170 Mosaic 31/3 (September 1998)

collage is particularly feminist, we may speak of "feminist collage," mindful

that this body of work includes a number of theories and practices in various
media arising from different historical and social contexts, which have been
guided by and have furthered feminist goals/

* I would like to thank the Center for the Humanities at the University of Virginia for providing
the office space and stimulating environment that enabled me to undertake this project, and the
University of Virginia Libraries for access and assistance in pursuing the research. I also want to
thank Western Michigan University for assistance provided by the Faculty Research and Creative
Activities Support Fund and the President's Professional Development Award, as well as for time
released from administrative and teaching duties.

WORKS CITED

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Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: U of M

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Kruger, Barbara. Love for Sale: The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger. New York: Abrams,
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 Gwen Raaberg 171

Waldman, Diane. Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object. New York: Abrams, 1992.

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GWEN RAABERG is Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies at

Western Michigan University. Publishing in the field of20-century literature, art, and theory,

she is editor, with Mary Ann Caws and Rudolf Kuenzli, of Surrealism and Women and has

been awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and Fulbright Senior Lectureship.

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