Collage Culture

Postmodern Studies 49

Series
edited by

Theo D’haen
and
Hans Bertens
 Collage Culture
Readymades, Meaning,
and the Age of Consumption

David Banash

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013

Copyright information:
Earlier versions of parts of Chapters 2 and 3 were published in
“Writing through the Real: Twentieth-Century Literary Collage.”
Ph.D. diss. The University of Iowa, 2003. An earlier version of part of
Chapter 2 appeared as “From Advertising to the Avant-Garde:
Rethinking the Invention of Collage,” Postmodern Culture 14, no. 2
(January 2004). An earlier version of part of Chapter 4 appeared as
“Collection Obsession: William Davies King’s ‘Collections of
Nothing’” in Pop Matters, August 15, 2008. Earlier versions of parts
of Chapters 3 and 4 appeared as “Collage as Practice and Metaphor in
Popular Culture” in Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art,
Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law, edited by Kembrew
McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011 .

Cover image:
Linder, Untitled, 1977. Courtesy of Linder Sterling, Stuart Shave / Modern
Art.

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.

ISBN: 978-90-420-3681-9
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0942-7
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2013
Printed in The Netherlands
For Andrea Spain and Jamie Currie
 Contents

Acknowledgments 9

Introduction 11

1 Fragments: Production, Consumption,

and the Readymade 33

2 Invention: Newspapers, Advertising,

and the Origins of Collage 81

3 Critique: Collage and the Politics of the Cut 121

4 Nostalgia: Collage, Collecting and the Paste 173

5 Gleaning: Everyday Life in Collage Culture 217

Conclusion: From the Twentieth­Century’s Cutting Edge

to the Twenty­First­Century Copy 243

Notes 265

Bibliography 291

Index 305
 Acknowledgments

I began working on collage in a dissertation that explored the use of

ready­made materials in modern American literature at The
University of Iowa, and this book extends and develops that work.
Neither the dissertation nor this book would have been possible
without the support, insight, and encouragement of my adviser Rudolf
E. Kuenzli. His astonishing knowledge of the historical avant­garde
and his generosity have deeply informed all my scholarship. I would
also like to thank Kembrew McLeod, Dee Morris, David Wittenberg,
Brooks Landon, and Jennifer Banash. Robert Latham has offered
more than a decade of friendship, helpful criticism, and support. John
Mann, Tama Baldwin, and Jack gave me inspiration, friendship, and a
roof to write under. Marcus Boon challenged my understanding of
collage, and his work always keeps me open to new ways of
conceptualizing and listening to the world. Kevin Moist helped me
rethink the meaning of collecting. Thanks to Steve Tomasula, Davis
Schneiderman, Anne­Laure Tissut, Bradley Dilger, Marjorie Allison,
Anthony Enns, Bob Banash, and Jeanne J. Wilcox. Thanks to Jason
and Kimberly Miller for a place to write. Thanks to William
Thompson and everyone else at the reference desk of Malpass
Library. Thanks to Guy Shadwick for friendship, family, a place to
read, and a glass that was always overflowing. Mark and Amy
Mossman rescued me more than once. Thanks to the keen eyes of
Nicole Schultz, who copyedited the manuscript, and to John
DeGregorio, my meticulous research assistant who devoted so much
time to copyediting, formatting, and indexing the final version. This
book was composed on open source programs. Thanks to the
Document Foundation for Libre Office and to the open source
desktop publisher produced by the Scribus community. Thanks to
Masja Horn, Esther Roth, and everyone at Rodopi. For James Currie,
who taught me to hear Adorno’s laughter, and, most of all, to Andrea
Spain, who showed me what it means to be worthy of what happens.
 INTRODUCTION

Over the course of the twentieth century, the twin developments of

mass production and mass media in the capitalist economies of the
Global North completed a total transformation of everyday life,
reorienting almost every activity toward consumption. Things once
locally produced and often handmade were now mass produced and
commodified, turning local, artisanal producers into deskilled laborers
serving the assembly line. This world of mass production radically
altered the meaning of objects in an unprecedented and profound
reification that reached into every sphere of life. This was not just the
fate of objects, but also of the practices with which they are always
enmeshed. Mass production and commodification liquidated what
remained of folkways tied to local production, demanding people
construct the meaning of their lives through purchases rather than
production. This transition to a lifeworld of consumption affected not
only concrete objects, but even more forcefully altered symbolic and
aesthetic practices. Technologies of mechanical reproduction
redefined story, image, and music, altering the traditions of both fine
and folk art with mass produced and distributed forms in newspapers,
advertising, radio, film, and television that shattered the aura of fine
art and liquidated folk art almost completely. Rather than making their
stories, images, and music, ever more urbanized workers and
managers consumed new mass­produced art forms that, epitomized
by the Hollywood studio system, developed into the wall­to­wall
mediascape of twenty­four hour broadband that now blankets the city,
the suburb, and the country alike.
12 Banash

Given these developments, this book seeks to answer the

following questions: How did art and literature respond to this age of
consumption? What do the productions and practices of artists and
writers reveal about the meaning of mass production, consumption,
reification, mechanical reproduction, and meaning? Artists and
writers leave a unique record of struggle, argument, critique, tactics,
and invention. They explicitly struggle with and reflect on the
problems of meaning, and, moreover, these struggles are not
categorically different from the problems everyone faces in a world of
consumption. By understanding the response of art and literature, I
believe that we understand the problems, urgencies, and possibilities
of a world unfolding through the commodity form.
My thesis: artists in every medium throughout the twentieth
century turn to collage to respond to the possibilities and limits of an
inescapable consumer culture. I argue that by employing collage
techniques, artists solve the problem of making meaning in a ready­
made world. Through collage, artists find ways to evade, negotiate,
reflect, or sometimes undo the reification of commodity culture.
Connecting collage practices across mediums, genres, art movements,
nations, and times, I argue that the prevalence of the technique cannot
be understood simply as the unfolding necessity of a particular
medium’s evolution or a localized response to specific problems, but
rather reflects a truly dialectical response to the ubiquity of the
commodity form as it developed though mass production, mass
media, and consumer culture.
Artists and writers broadly adopted two tactics to cope with
mass production. The first was to resist commodification and develop
non­alienated relationships to their work. The abstract expressionist
painters most vividly embody this tactic of direct resistance, an
attempt to evade or escape the demands of consumer culture through
the most revolutionary aspirations of romanticism. Strikingly,
however, the two greatest visual artists of the century, Marcel
Duchamp and Andy Warhol, chose a second tactic. Instead of openly
 Introduction 13

resisting or evading the commodity form they went into it, directly
engaging it with what Jean Baudrillard calls the fatal
strategy–becoming the very thing the system demands, but pushing
this process to such an extreme that it is dialectically transformed.
Just as everyone had to cope with buying standardized, mass­
produced goods from store shelves and watching the latest Hollywood
stars, Duchamp and Warhol turned directly to the commodities of
mass production and mass media respectively, going beyond a revival
of romanticism by developing new modes of critical, ironic, and
sometimes celebratory practice. Duchamp took objects of mass
production and named them ready­mades while Warhol appropriated
the techniques of advertising and the very images of mass media.
Their reliance on materials they did not create themselves, but simply
found ready­to­hand, put them in the position of consumers
expressing themselves through choice rather than technique.
Duchamp and Warhol embody most clearly the importance of artists
turning toward the materials of consumer culture and adopting the
very practice of consumption as a way to make meanings in excess of
the instrumental ends of commodity culture and in contradiction of
the culture industry’s expectations or desires. The meanings Duchamp
and Warhol make possible in their practice and their body of work are
sometimes critical, often deeply personal, and, arguably, offer models
to understand how ordinary people negotiate the need for meaningful
production and practice in the midst of standardization and its
dialectical loss of tradition.
Though Duchamp and Warhol are not ordinarily thought of as
collage artists, I demonstrate that collage techniques provide the best
way to understand their practices, as well as the practices of the most
significant artists and writers wrestling with the realities of consumer
culture. Twentieth­century collage techniques make use of consumer
culture, cutting up mass­produced objects and media to actively
produce new works in almost every field, from the war protests of
dada poets and the excesses of surrealism to postwar interventionist
14 Banash

photomontage and musicians assembling new music out of ready­

made fragments. The technique of collage is a negation of
consumption that turns the process into a positive practice of
production while remaining completely within and working through
the commodity form in consumer culture. Simultaneously, collage
techniques remain a mirror of the very consumerist culture they often
seek to critique, relying on the very kinds of choices and labors that
define the behaviors of consumers. Furthermore, collage becomes one
of the most widespread and perceptive metaphors for the phenomenal
experience of everyday life in consumer culture characterized by
overproduction and media, and as metaphor it is mobilized by popular
writers and filmmakers to vividly evoke the experience of a radically
fragmented world. It is the very way that collage both contests and
reproduces the alienation of a world mediated by the commodity form
that makes this technique so apt and powerful and explains the
predominance of Duchamp and Warhol.
Collage techniques consist of two actions: selection and
arrangement. These actions take many different forms, but they are
always recognizable. In papier collé and photomontage, the artist cuts
apart ready­made images or words and then pastes them together in a
new work. In filmic montage, shots are cut apart and then spliced
together to create a new whole. In assemblage, whole or fragmented
objects are selected and then put together in a novel arrangement.
Even Duchamp’s ready­mades contain both moments, as the
anonymous, serially produced commodity is first selected but must
then be placed within the new institutional context that transforms it
into a work of art. There is a narrative dimension to this process, as
the selection must precede the arrangement, and thus collage can be
thought of not only as two actions but as two moments in time, the
whole telling a story of transformation.
Throughout, I argue that collage is central to understanding
the development of the twentieth century because it is an uncanny
mirror of both the Fordist production that characterized the first half
 Introduction 15

of the century and the consumerist ethos that defined the postwar
years. Fordism was premised on a vast fragmentation of holistically
integrated methods of production. Every aspect of the process was
analyzed and standardized. What was once grasped as a totality was
now seen as an assemblage of manipulable parts. This was not only
applied to the parts and products fabricated on the assembly line, but
through time­studies, the workers themselves were shattered, their
own movements broken into the smallest possible parts. Cutting
manufacturing processes into a series of irreducible operations,
Fordism separated workers from any concrete grasp of a total process.
This affected even perceptions of workers themselves, who Ford
himself fantasized about as shattered wholes, noting that “of the 7,882
distinct operations” necessary to assemble a car, “we found that 670
could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one­legged men, two by
armless men, 715 by one­armed men, and ten by blind men.”1 The
fragmentation of mass production yielded an unprecedented profusion
of things, filling store shelves with a vast array of different goods, all
of them blank slates of reification, and by the 1950s, the number of
goods and brands available presented consumers with the illusion of
infinite choice, deadening sameness, and a new kind of
labor–consumption.
Consumption comes to define not only a class position, but an
endless bifurcation of identities–drawing the finest distinctions in
values and political commitments between a dizzying array of
emerging subcultural possibilities. These difficult choices become a
constant demand throughout the social as a consequence of the
fragmentation of the world into an infinite series of objects to be
assembled into a lifestyle. Thus, fragmentation must not only be
thought of in terms of production because it is equally the experience
of the consumer. Lautréamont’s observation that the most beautiful
work of art in the world is “the meeting of an umbrella and a sewing
machine on the dissecting table”2 became one of the slogans of
surrealism, and even today, Lautréamont’s theory of beauty is
16 Banash

recreated anew each moment as people fill shopping cart after

shopping cart or surf through the channels of digital cable, or simply
absorb the disparate advertising of a city.3 William S. Burroughs goes
so far as to suggest all of our perception must now be understood as
the consumption of cut­ups, the constant confusion of categories and
chance juxtapositions of elements: “Of course, because cut­ups make
explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway.
Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in
the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But
subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of
the person sitting next to him.”4 Unlike the assembly line worker,
however, the moment of assemblage is more often not a reflection of
production, but of the labor of consumption. Unlike traditional artists
who grasped their art holistically–old masters often mixed their own
pigments, for instance–the collage artist arranges fragments to which
they have no holistic relationship through the labor of consumption.
The process of assembling a collage more precisely mirrors the
consumer wandering through a vast mall, selecting this and then that,
bringing it all together in a new arrangement. Jean Baudrillard
describes the codes of consumption in terms perfectly apt to the
moment of collage assembly: “through objects, each individual and
each group searches out his or her place in an order, all the while
trying to jostle this order according to a personal trajectory. Through
the object, a stratified society speaks.”5 Baudrillard here emphasizes
how consumers try to both conform to and manufacture a narcissism
of small differences at the same time. He captures the ways in which
the ready­made objects of capitalist production become a code with
which to write our names in a seemingly privatized script. Like the
consumer speaking a code of identity by assembling particular
elements, the collage artist assembles a work from ready­made
materials to make an individual statement that nonetheless speaks the
universal code of capitalism. Though the final collage could well be
shocking, critical, or irrational, it is assembled from the consistency
 Introduction 17

of the commodity and mirrors and reproduces the operations of the

consumerist lifeworld.
As much as collage is a mirror of production and
consumption, it can also operate as a deeply critical form, cutting
against the typical practices and ideologies of both these moments of
capitalism. For instance, just as holistic labors and even workers
themselves are cut to fragments by the process of mass production, so
collage artists no longer have to respect any work–a book, an image, a
passage of music–as a totality. Collage artists cut into images, syntax,
and contexts, breaking things apart with the same radical zeal of
Fordism. In this, they can alter, expose, ridicule, or transform the
coherence of ideologies. This is extraordinarily powerful, because the
very forces of critique or transformation unleashed by capital are
recontained in totalizing, coherent ideologies. Collage cuts into these,
exposing and transforming the materials of ideological discourse. In
less obviously resistant modes, collage also cuts against many
imperatives of capitalist practice. For instance, the imperative to
dispose of goods, planned obsolescence, and sheer waste is
recuperated and overturned in the nostalgic modes of collage practice
that reuse what would be wasted, giving it new life in new contexts.
By reusing objects, fragments, and waste, the collage artist offers a
form of making meaning that suggests the imperative to the new, as
the only possible way to make meaning, is a fraud. Indeed, I will
argue at length that critique and nostalgia are the primary modes of
collage, often coextensive in every work. Further, the radical
juxtaposition of collage contests the coherent styles of the culture
industry, and though new collage styles will be recuperated (as early
MTV recuperated the radical styles of avant­garde film), the endless
potential for recombination allows some on the terrain of everyday
life to establish styles and produce meanings that are not completely
overwritten by the point­of­purchase. Other examples of gleaning,
thrifting, reuse, do­it­yourself, sampling, and copying offer
18 Banash

concrete practices to rework some of the most pernicious aspects of

the culture industry.
The importance of collage techniques in every artistic
medium in the twentieth century is often remarked upon, but rarely
considered comprehensively. Most books focusing on collage look at
only one particular genre–papier collé or assemblage, for instance,
and they invariably emphasize the concerns of Art History, assigning
precedence, importance, and charting the relationships between artists
and movements. They miss just how pervasive collage techniques are
in all genres, both in fine art and popular media, for visual artists,
sculptors, filmmakers, writers, and musicians. Overwhelmingly,
twentieth­century artists turned toward collage in every medium
because collage techniques provided a necessary form, a way of
working through the problems posed by new modes of production and
consumption. Indeed, collage is the correlative form of both mass
production and consumption that defined the century.
Throughout Collage Culture, I strive to situate individual
artists and movements in the larger totality of economic forces and
cultural transformations that demanded collage as a response and
solution in every sphere of cultural production. I survey the twentieth
century in terms of collage, offer concrete readings of every major
mode of collage, theorize collage as a form, and argue that collage is
not only the form and practice at the center of twentieth­century
culture, but that this form becomes one of the coordinating metaphors
of the century, allowing artists, writers, and their audiences to
understand the experience of mass production, consumerism, and
mass media.
Collage depends not only on cutting and pasting, but on the
ready­made status of the fragments the artist brings together.
Techniques like mosaic or decorative pasted papers have been
assembled with cut and pasted fragments for thousands of years, but
these practices are significantly different than collage as it is practiced
throughout the twentieth century, and the brutal difference is that
 Introduction 19

twentieth­century fragments come ready­made. A readymade is

simply what we pluck off the shelves of a store or find cast off in a
street or a dumpster. It is what other human hands have worked over,
shaped, formed, completed, and almost always at some point sold as a
commodity: it is “ready­made” for our use, and it is not nature.
Historically, almost every human being has had to take the raw
materials of the world–be they the fibers of plants or the stones of the
earth–and labor to make them useful, beautiful, or deadly. No more.
As I write, it is possible to fish in the most remote parts of the sea and
net complete plastic objects from every part of the world. Discarded
plastic dolls, toothbrushes, syringes, and Styrofoam cups wash up on
the beaches of the world, just as they crash in waves onto the shelves
of category­killing stores. Not only are the United States and Europe
awash in cheap, expendable, disposable goods, but so is every corner
of the earth. The poorest villages in Africa, China, or South America
have brightly colored plastic toys and t­shirts advertising rock bands
or football teams that were once destined for the shelves of a Wal­
Mart. These things that are consumed in the Global North are often
not destroyed or recycled; the waste of plastics, clothes, toxic
electronics, and other goods are packed in containers and simply
dumped in the poorest parts of the world, overwhelming and often
wreaking havoc on cultures and landscapes. The world of the
readymade, what in the U.S. was once called “store­bought,” is at
least as much of a reality as nature itself, and like nature, one can in
recent years find it absolutely everywhere. The flood of mass­
produced, cheap, consumable goods of all kinds has fundamentally
transformed life.
From the ancients through the romantics, most theories of art
had something to say about holding a mirror up to nature. Nature was
the world one found, and to live meant working directly with its raw
materials. Indeed, for most of human history, it was impossible to live
one’s life without laboring, which often involved a fantastically hard
process of finding, refining, and assembling the raw materials of
20 Banash

nature to create a sustainable, inhabitable, and pleasant environment.

People in the world did just this, and developed material cultures that
looked very much like the places in which they lived. This work and
the role of place and materials were reflected in the arts of every
culture. Nature dominated theories of art in the West, and the point of
art was to reveal the beauty and meaning of the world, particularly the
natural world, by working through its elements. Starting with a block
of stone, pigments suspended in oils, or even just ink and paper, the
artist would recreate the beauty of the body, the color of sunlight on
water, or rhyme the bitterness of death. The rhythms of art were the
changing seasons, its raw materials–things everyone could understand
because they shared profoundly in the experience of the given natural
world. Rather recently, the literary critic Northrop Frye wrote a
monumental theory of the world’s literature, and his explanations
were tied deeply to the rhythms of lives engaged closely to the
demands and rhythms of the natural world.6 So much so that life and
its literary mirrors and lamps could all be united in a universalized
rhythm of four seasons, from birth in the spring to death in the winter.
Such theories of mimesis and art from the ancients to contemporaries
like Frye seem totally inadequate to the experience of big­box stores:
places open day and night, flooded in artificial light, where the
seasons do not change and the constant and total control of
temperature, light, and every other aspect of the environment is
regulated, seamless, and unvarying. Where classic shopping malls
built by high modernists like Victor Gruen would incorporate water
features and windows, Wal­Mart culture has dispensed with even such
vestigial gestures to a natural world. The big­boxes’ relentless
overhead lights shine down on industrial shelves at all times and the
only mark of a changing season is to be found in the variance of
seasonal goods being pushed. In the most insular enclaves of
suburban living in the U.S., people buy the things of life ready­to­use,
most often ignorant of who made them, under what conditions, and at
what cost. Consumers leave the stores in the artificial environments of
 Introduction 21

their cars and return to homes similarly sealed and regulated, in which
the rhythms of television more than the sun dictate everyday life. It is
now possible to live much of one’s existence in a totally ready­made
and controlled environment.
One may object to what I have stated above on the grounds
that my example is a bit too ideal, too simplistic, that I have neglected
the fact that for centuries “raw materials” have been in reality
processed and worked over by others before the individual or the
artists takes them up. After all, the painter did not make the canvas
and even the writer depended on the rag picker and the paper maker
before the poet could write the lines. Yet the writer still faced a blank
page as the painter a blank canvas: their materials may have been
refined but they were not complete. To complete them, they applied
their skills to transform the materials they found, and the
transformation changed them, adding the value of their labor. Claude
Lévi­Strauss suggested the great mythological axis of culture falls
between the poles of the raw and the cooked. Raw materials are those
closer to a natural state, while the cooked have been fully worked
over and integrated into culture. These are not absolute states but a
continuum, with a cook mediating the degree to which something is
left raw or fully cooked, even burnt. Surely the blank canvas is closer
to the raw then the completed painting, just as the blank page is raw
in comparison to the printed and bound book. In both cases, like the
cook, artists must transform these materials, bringing them further
and more completely into fully realized relationships of culture.7
Unlike the raw materials of any art, the readymade comes
fully cooked. Lévi­Strauss actually suggested that the symbolic
cooking of culture be considered a mediatization (338). Thus cooking
not only works over raw materials, but may also serve as a way to
think about situating subjects in relation to culture. While an
unmarried sister is put on the stove to “cook” her into the social, “the
symbolical demediatization of the bride, which is an anticipation of
the wedding night, consists of stealing her garter which is connected
22 Banash

with the ‘middle’ world” (338). In folk customs and mythology, the
raw and the cooked exist in a balance, and one can remain either too
raw or become overcooked. Surely consumer culture exists almost
entirely on the side of the cooked, and the mediation of cooking has
been reified, taken out of everyday life, and moved behind the factory
walls. Less and less do consumers find themselves in the magically
transformative position of the laborer who mediates between the raw
and the cooked in any way.
To put contemporary consumer culture in perspective, I
would like to take a humble but fitting domestic example to elucidate
the stakes of the readymade, the raw, and the cooked. In many
families, baking cookies begins as a ritual in childhood, an act in
which great pleasure is found in taking the refined but nonetheless
raw materials such as sugar, salt, and flour to create something sweet.
Each attempt is a test of skills and materials, sometimes with better
results than others. Even two people working independently but with
the same materials and recipe can ultimately create something that
tastes unique to the other. In any case, the pleasure stems not just
from the eating, but as much or more in the making: the process of
both baking the cookies and the social interaction. However, these
days, cookies need not be made at home; they can be bought directly
off the shelves. “Ready­to­eat” is the term of art in the food business,
and millions of packages of ready­to­eat cookies are sold. Fair
enough. Store­bought cookies are convenient and often tasty as well.
But something is missing there, and that is the labor of making, the
test of skills, and the position of mediation between nature and
culture, the making not only of things but also of relationships.
Companies now also market mass­produced dough that one can buy,
put on a cookie sheet, and bake. The demand for this particular kind
of product suggests the profound transformation in our culture, the
rhythms of everyday life, and the very notion of labor. Whether it be
bought fully complete in a bag (truly “ready­made” food) or refined
to such a point that there is no demand for any meaningful exercise of
 Introduction 23

labor (a “ready­made” food we must minimally assist), consumer

culture strives to eliminate labor from everyday life, but in doing so
there is sensibly a loss of texture, the pleasures of even certain
mundane labors, and thus meaning. It is just this loss of meaning, I
believe, that the manufacturers of pre­made cookie dough are trying
to sell by providing a simulacrum of both physical and symbolic labor
without the pain of dirty dishes and the risk of burnt, inedible cookies
when our materials or attention fail us.8
The very word “readymade” used in association with fine art
is the invention of artist Marcel Duchamp. Readymades remain a
defining gesture and genre of twentieth­century art. Duchamp had
both the audacity and the genius to simply pick rather banal objects–a
bicycle wheel, a urinal, a snow shovel, a typewriter’s dust cover–and
call the art “ready­made.” Almost every theorist of art and a
remarkable number of philosophers and critics have talked about
them since. Duchamp’s work is a devastating test to the limits of the
identity of art and artists. Duchamp argued that art is simply a matter
of institutions; his readymades, by the very fact they were chosen to
hang on a gallery wall, were defined as pieces of art. Many may find
Duchamp’s choices remarkable and formally beautiful, proof that he
had a superior visual sense that allowed him to find striking forms
that unintentionally inhabit the world. Thus, it seems there is
something to the privileged magic circle of art after all, even if it is
ready­made. This interpretation and the fundamental questions of, “Is
it art?” and “What is art?” are not what I will spend much time on
here. Indeed, I think we are now at a moment when the question of
the readymade is not a test of art but a test of life. The readymade is
not only hanging on the gallery wall or encased in the museum’s
vitrines. In today’s world, readymades surround us to the extent that
the problem of the readymade is how to live in a world that we have
not made, and more and more often are encouraged not even to
complete but only to consume. The layman’s complaint against much
of modern art is its ready­made status: the fact that it seemingly
24 Banash

requires no technical skill. Yet that art itself is a mirror of a ready­

made life that has been similarly deskilled to the point that we must
now find ways to live and make a meaningful world when the
technical skills to make that world are no longer required or even
possessed by most of the people who live in it. To think about the
readymade is to think about the life of consumer culture. If once we
were at least a little more like artists who took materials to make
meaning through labor, those privileged to live in consumer cultures
are much more like Duchamp, simply gesturing with the magical
transfiguration at the point­of­purchase. Hegel’s master­slave
dialectic, in which the master finds the world meaningless because he
cannot know himself through his own labor, could now be rewritten
as the producer­consumer dialectic with much the same irony. The
genius of Duchamp is to overturn this in a radical gesture that makes
the banal purchase again meaningful, bringing to consciousness the
need to invent the world around us rather than merely consuming it.
The question I want to ask is not why the readymade is or is
not art. Instead, the real question is one of how the meaning of life
changes when consumption has stripped away the need for many
labors and simultaneously overwhelmed us with a profusion of things.
This, at least directly for many in the Global North, is an
unprecedented problem that is only now becoming clear. Indeed,
utopian fantasies of total plentitude, automation, and the like were
once mostly the stuff of science fiction, and life still demanded
enormous labor, but the utopia has come to pass for those with
enough security and wealth. The world of consumer culture is filled
with an infinite flow of goods, services, images, narratives, forms,
objects, and information of every kind. Indeed, even landscapes and
the movement of time itself are packaged, branded, and handed over
ready­made. I hope to understand at least some of the consequences
of these developments, and to come to some conclusions about the
effects of this, and possible responses to it. To get at this problem, I
have turned to Duchamp and other artists who work with readymades.
 Introduction 25

However, I do not believe this question of meaning is limited to, or

even more intense in, the world of art. Rather, I think that it is
ordinary people living everyday lives that more often than not wrestle
with it and devise what philosopher Michel de Certeau called a
“tactics” to cope with it. However, most people do not leave easily
accessible records of these struggles, unlike artists, who do record
those tactics and name them art. So, in the work of writers, painters,
musicians, and filmmakers, we find people who wrestle with the
question of meaning when their labors and skills are minimized,
erased, or simulated because of mass production. It is in this sense
that I do think contemporary art has also held up the mirror to nature,
though the nature of life has changed, and what these artists reflect
can no longer be called natural. The mirror is nonetheless there, and
by looking into it, perhaps we can better understand the problems of
life in a ready­made culture and also see how at least a few people
have found ways of making it meaningful.
The most familiar image of collage as an aesthetic strategy is
defined in the verbal and visual works of the avant­garde. For artists
from Pablo Picasso to Kathy Acker, collage techniques enabled a
powerful critique of anything from the visual plane of painting to
literary ideologies of gender. Cutting apart ready­made images and
words and then assembling them into new works of art challenged the
romantic ideology of the creative artist, and often yielded works of
intense and telling juxtapositions. In his seminal essay “Beyond
Painting,” Surrealist Max Ernst asks: “What is the most noble
conquest of collage?”9 His answer, unsurprisingly, emphasizes the
critical functions of collage for avant­gardists: “The irrational. The
magisterial eruption of the irrational in all domains of art, of poetry,
of science, in the private life of individuals, in the public life of
peoples. He who speaks of collage speaks of the irrational” (17). For
Ernst, as for the surrealists and other critical collage artists, the
process of cutting apart source texts and reassembling them into new
works with shocking or telling juxtapositions reveals the fragile
26 Banash

nature of ideologies–what Ernst characterizes as both the domains of

public and private life. Thus both the ideologies of nationalism and
capitalism, as well as seemingly private ideologies of sexuality are
exposed to the transformative powers of the irrational cuts of collage.
Indeed, Ernst is at pains to underscore the magical, transformative
potentials of collage: “One might define collage as an alchemy
resulting from the unexpected meeting of two or more heterogeneous
elements, those elements provoked either by a will which–from a love
of clairvoyance–is directed toward systematical confusion and
disorder of all the senses (Rimbaud), or by hazard, or by a will
favorable to hazard” (16). Like the aestheticized serial killer,10 the
collage artists of the avant­garde are emphatically described as
transgressors of social norms and creators of new, irrational
possibilities. Ernst, closer to the beginning of the twentieth century, is
responding to the sameness underwritten by mass production and
commodity culture’s one­dimensional logic. However, as much as
mass production is a sign of sameness, it is also an operation of vast
fragmentation, and the very irrationality that Ernst celebrates as a
transgressive potential is the structural principal of capitalist
overproduction. Thus, the history of collage traces the fundamental
ironies of late capitalism, for while its cuts and juxtapositions rend
and reshape older ideologies, it remains a mirror of the larger forces
of economic fragmentation that are cutting up and restructuring a
global world.
The culture of the twentieth century has often been grasped as
an unprecedented shattering: the Fordist assembly line and
Taylorization broke apart manufacturing processes; the rise of mass
media ruptured traditional narrative and visual art forms; technologies
of communication and transportation fractured social relationships;
and the development of a consumer culture of ready­made, mass­
produced commodities all served to fragment everyday life. Indeed,
as Daniel Bell wrote in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,
“The modern movement disrupts the unity of culture ... shatters the
 Introduction 27

‘rational cosmology’ that underlay the bourgeois world view of an

ordered relation between space and time.”11 Bell’s abstract
identification of this fragmentation can be grasped in more immediate
and concrete terms by looking to the forces of modernization in
sectors of both production and consumption. As Thomas P.
Brockelman, Karsten Harries, Fredric Jameson, and others have
pointed out, the ordering functions of literal frames and generic
boundaries that once held together a hierarchical order have come
crashing down.12
The fragmentation associated with mass production is only
one side of a dialectical process. Mass­produced commodities, from
durable goods like cars to ephemeral media such as newspapers,
demand consumers who purchase and use these commodities less to
satisfy basic needs than to engage in the fundamentally aesthetic work
of exchanging signs. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the
Sign, Jean Baudrillard accounts for this labor of consumption: “under
this paradoxical determination, objects are not the locus of the
satisfaction of needs, but of a symbolic labor” (33). Like the artist
who chooses fragments to insert into a collage, the consumer too
works with readymades, picking and choosing, sometimes in
obedience to a code, but just as often entering into aesthetic
transgressions: “That is to say, they use it [symbolic codes] in their
own way. They play with it, they break its rules, they speak it with
their class dialect” (37). Baudrillard’s formulations can be found in
the work of other Marxists, from the Frankfurt school that precedes
him to later theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu. However, Baudrillard’s
emphasis on the role of ready­made commodities and the labor of
making them speak for the consumer is particularly useful to
understanding the role of collage in a ready­made world of consumer
goods of all kinds. Baudrillard is at pains to emphasize the role of
these commodities over and above less tangible sorts of cultural
capital (like vocabularies, worldviews, attitudes, etc.) Baudrillard
imagines the consumer selecting from a vast system of commodities,
28 Banash

playing with an arrangement of objects, from refrigerators to couches,

clothes to cars, in negotiating a place in the world. Like the collage
artist who selects ready­made elements to make a new statement, the
consumer assembles a new totality out of an infinite number of
individual fragments, literally shopping (or sometimes scavenging,
stealing, or faking) new identities.
Technologies of mass production not only created an
abundance of things but also drove a complete transformation of
media and human relationships to information and images of all
kinds. Essentially, what before existed as unique moments of
performance (telling a story, playing a song) or irreproducible works
of art (a painting in oils) became just one more commodity turned out
by the assembly lines. Suddenly words and images were simply
everywhere, reproduced in newspapers, advertising posters, and new
technologies such as cinema and later, radio and television.
Information embodied and disseminated in these forms became more
and more like the objects of consumer culture: simply there to be
used, cut­up, and manipulated. No need to have an almost religious
attitude to the reproduction of a painting or a print of a film. These
could now be treated as casually as used bus passes. While states used
this newfound media explosion to disseminate ideology, collage
became the strategy of political intervention. Yet collage still could
also serve other, more conservative desires as well. Indeed, the
meaning of collage is often dependent on which moment–cutting or
pasting–the artist or the audience privileged. However, as the process
of collage is a dialectic, either moment necessarily implies the other.
This book frames the twentieth century in terms of collage.
Throughout, I argue that the physicality of mass production and the
consumption of objects are best grasped through the practices of
collage, but both the practices and even more shockingly the
metaphorics of collage breakdown in our digital world with its
seemingly infinite and effortless circulation. While the twentieth
century was a century of the mass­produced object and all that attends
 Introduction 29

it for everyday life and art, the twenty­first century is about the reign
of codes, and the concept of copying proves far more flexible than
that of collage. From the perspective of the copy and its digital
worlds, the anxieties and transformations of the twentieth century
become suddenly clearer; collage is the art of the assembly line, the
newspaper, the film, the fragment. As these forms have been exceeded
and enmeshed in the digital, collage has been liquidated or mutated
into a process of copying.
Chapter 1, “Fragments: Production, Consumption, and the
Readymade,” frames the development of the readymade and collage
in the rise of mass production, its fragmenting effects on everyday
life, and the appearance of the readymade as an artistic modality. To
fully understand this radical development, however, it is vital to
understand how the idea of fragments informed an earlier world
without mass production, and so I argue that both Greek and Egyptian
mythology as well as Jewish mysticism recognized fragmentation of
both the world and the psyche but never exploited this fact as a mode
of meaning or art, seeking instead myths of healing and wholeness.
Fragmentation remained a disastrous consequence of embodiment,
something to be redeemed through myth or ritual. This remained the
case until the eighteenth century, when the technologies and
inventions that would revolutionize the world produced new attitudes
toward the fragment in an aesthetic of ruins and unfinished works that
prefigure the collage practices that would dominate twentieth­century
modernism. The readymade, the key element of collage culture,
would not appear until the twentieth century in the work of Marcel
Duchamp. However, I argue that Duchamp’s ready­mades are
profoundly a part of the machine aesthetic of production, caught up in
reflections about the transformations of making in a world of mass
production. The anxieties and questions addressed by his works are
quite distinct from the readymades of the postwar period produced by
pop artists and contemporary installation artists like Sarah Sze. These
artists rethink the problem of the readymade as one of fragmentation
30 Banash

in consumption. Yet the fragmented readymades of the earlier

production aesthetic remain distinct from the forms and meanings of
the consumption aesthetic. The rise of the readymade in art is thus not
simply an investigation of limits of art, but rather a comprehensive
engagement with the problems of making meaning in a culture of
mass production and consumption.
Chapter 2, “Invention: Newspapers, Advertising, and the
Origins of Collage,” looks at the origins of fine art collage through
the medium of newspapers. The newspaper is the first truly modern
mass medium that reduces images and words to the status of cheap,
ubiquitous, serially produced, physical things. The importance for
early modernists cannot be overstated. The newspaper is structured
with collage logic, as its endless columns unroll with serial
juxtaposition of the words and images of everyday life. The form
became both inspiration and raw material for the first fine art collages
of the cubist painters and the very stuff of poetry and resistance for
the dadaists. The newspaper is a key media form for modernity,
especially with its seminal role as ideological tool of the state and
advertising platform for capitalists. Newspapers inspired radical
collage critiques that ironically mirrored its form, which itself is an
allegory of capitalism with its irrational profusion of words and things
all distributed along the oversized page. For later postmodern artists,
the newspaper’s uniquely flat form would inspire both painters and
writers. Robert Rauschenberg and postmodern poets and novelists like
Brion Gysin and William Burroughs cut across the newspaper, taking
it as an ideological trap but also as a raw material to rewrite the world
through a strategy of collage. The newspaper form is the ur­medium
of twentieth­century collage, and this chapter traces the century as
artists respond and reuse this most important ready­made material in
collages, paintings, and cut­ups.
Chapter 3, “Critique: Collage and the Politics of the Cut,”
surveys collage as a form of political critique. Focusing particularly
on photography, this chapter begins with the truth­force of the
 Introduction 31

photograph, its ability to present an index of reality unmarked by the

artist’s subjectivity. This power was exploited particularly by state
ideologies that sought to harness the truth of photography to the
service of ideology, a confirmation of state desires. The work of
collage artists like John Heartfield also depended on the force of
photography, but did so by turning the images of fascism against
themselves, exposing the ideological contexts and limits of these
images. Taking photography as the exemplary case, I argue that
critical collages draw much of their force from the inclusion of the
very images and words they seek to contest. In essence, the collage
artist cuts into a seemingly “given,” neutral image of “truth” and
resituates it as a clearly manipulatable sign. While the cutting, critical
gesture of collage thus reveals the constructed, differential nature of
all words and images, critique itself is paradoxically more powerful
by including the very images and words it seeks to unmask. With the
photograph, this is particularly obvious, but I argue that this is true of
literary collage as well, and most intensely exemplified in the
plagiarized novels of Kathy Acker.
Chapter 4, “Nostalgia: Collage, Collecting, and the Paste,”
investigates the powerful libidinal investments objects foster in a
ready­made culture. Throughout, I concentrate particularly on
practices of collecting as an allegory of the collage artist, and frame
both the collagist and the collector as figures of possible relationships
to a world of objects and media. Beginning with Orson Welles’s
Citizen Kane, I survey the century, including the work of
contemporary novelists and filmmakers. Following the fortunes of
collectors, I argue that the representations of objects and collecting in
contemporary literature, and the fascination with the old and the
outmoded, show that even objects incorporated into critical collages
produce a profound nostalgia and melancholy. In this, I hope to
suggest that collage is animated by two desires: the cutting edge of
critique that seeks the differential frisson of new contexts to explode
possible meanings of any fragment and the conservative desire of
32 Banash

nostalgia that persists in any collage that calls out to the earlier
contexts of its fragments. Throughout, I depend on Walter Benjamin’s
insight that collage could be rethought as both simultaneously the
work of the neurotic seeking closure and order in the collection and
the psychotic allegorist blasting things into new and endlessly
meaningful arrangements.
Chapter 5, “Gleaning: Everyday Life in Collage Culture,”
concentrates on how people make meaning in consumer culture while
evading the actual practices and ideologies of consumer acquisition
defined by the point­of­sale. I enumerate and reflect on practices of
gleaning, including shoplifting, thrifting, trash­picking, and poaching
as they are represented in literature, memoires, films, and outsider art.
Concentrating on the twentieth century, I trace the ways in which
ancient practices of agricultural gleaning are remade in the films of
Charlie Chaplin, the practices of punk subculture, and the outsider art
of assemblage. Throughout, I attempt to show how the commodity
becomes a raw material, its meaning remade by the ingenuity and art
of a user who finds new modes of relating to what is given but not
owned, and, most profoundly, what is broken and cast off.
In the conclusion, I turn to the new practices and metaphorics
of copying that define the contemporary moment, arguing that collage
practices are deeply tied to the analog, physical forms of media that
defined the twentieth­century, and thus distinguishing the twentieth­
century as a world of collage from our contemporary moment as the
time of the copy.
 FRAGMENTS: PRODUCTION, CONSUMPTION, AND
THE READYMADE

No ideas but in things.

–William Carlos Williams

I fall to pieces each time I see you again.

–Patsy Cline

Things and Words

On his fantastic travels, Lemuel Gulliver encounters scholars busily
inventing new forms of language. These include a large mechanical
device that makes texts at random, an attempt to reduce language
exclusively to nouns, and, taking that idea to its logical conclusion,
the practice of substituting objects for words. From the perspective of
the twenty­first century, Jonathan Swift’s descriptions sound like a
prescient catalog of avant­garde practices. Indeed, his story of a
language made of things seems like an allegory of the twentieth
century and the rise of art under the sign of mass production and the
commodity form. As Gulliver puts it: “An expedient was therefore
offered, that since words are only names for things, it would be more
convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were
necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on.”1
For Swift, the eighteenth­century satirist, the joke is at the expense of
these would­be experimenters, for surely there is just too much in
34 Banash

human experience to be reduced to a set of brute, material objects,

and certainly these fools are missing the very point of language
itself–a more convenient and efficient form. And yet, from our
vantage point three centuries later, it seems clear that marketers seek
to reduce almost every human desire, thought, or experience to the
commodity form. Indeed, in the consumer economies of the Global
North, we now do a vast amount of communication through just such
brute and material things, and much as Swift imagined it, we seem to
use our designer clothes, customized kitchens, and electronic
accessories to explain who we are: human experience has never been
so overwrought with things. Indeed, rather like the Laputian
experimenters, we find that the most seemingly successful among us
exist more in a world of things than of words, much as how Swift
describes the mad Laputians:

[M]any of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of
expressing themselves by things, which hath only this inconvenience
attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he
must be obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things upon his
back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have
often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their
packs, like pedlars among us; who, when they met in the streets, would lay
down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour
together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their
burthens, and take their leave. (178)

In this language game, one’s range of expression is tied directly to

one’s wealth, for what one might say is in direct proportion to the
objects one carries. Swift’s historical position at the beginnings of
consumer society renders our contemporary interpretation of this
activity far more forceful, for while Swift notes that these
interlocutors resemble “pedlars,” they are different in that they do not
sell their vast bags of objects but make rhetorical use of them. Swift
 Fragments 35

cannot quite put his finger on just what this practice might be, for he
lacks its true name: consumption.
Perhaps a time­traveling Gulliver would not be at all
surprised to come face­to­face with the work of Heidi Cody, a
contemporary artist responding to a world of commodities through the
use of readymades, collage, and the multimedia techniques of
contemporary marketing and advertising. “As Americans, we are
surrounded by the white noise of our consumer culture,” explains
Cody in her artist statement. She readily admits her complicit role as a
consumer, “but with the critical perspective of a cultural
anthropologist. I hope my overall body of work will eventually be
seen as a sort of art documentary about advanced consumer culture.”2
One of Cody’s most striking works is a series entitled American
Haiku, which includes the piece entitled American Haiku–The
Mountain. Like her Laputian forebearers, she too takes objects out of
her bag, creating a haiku.
While Swift’s experimenters make a concerted effort to
abandon words and communicate only through things, Cody’s work
testifies to a much more radical transformation. Even words
themselves have become things, under the signs of brands and labels,
packaging and marketing: just so many objects that make up the
commodity horizon of our everyday lives. Unlike Marx, with his
endless examples of unnamed, unbranded commodities (one ton of
iron, ten shirts, a bushel of corn), commodities are now veritable
words: soap has become sunlight and dawn, while toothbrushes reach
and toothpastes gleem. Yet, like Swift, Cody too is a satirist, and her
playful haiku cuts with two edges. On the one hand, she points to the
absurdity of these word­things. Obviously dish soap, with its
connotations of domestic chores, is hardly comparable to dawn, and
the unearthly green of the soda has very little to do with mountains or
dews of any variety. Her lyric assemblage reminds us just how these
commodities have colonized the language of nature, and perhaps just
36 Banash

Heidi Cody, American Haiku–The Mountain, 1998, heidicody.com.

Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
 Fragments 37

how much more at home we are in the brightly lit aisles of

supermarkets rather than any real pastoral meadow or mountain. On
the other hand, Cody is operating first and foremost here as an artist
of the readymade, seemingly more a consumer than a producer. She is
not fundamentally transforming these objects, nor is she highlighting
the traditional mimetic skills of the artist to create trompe l’oeil
effects. Instead, she presents these objects virtually unchanged, or
with as little transformation as an advertising campaign might bring to
them. She speaks with them as though she were simply pulling them
from her shopping cart–as all who live in consumer cultures
inevitably do.
American Haiku perfectly formulates the paradox of
contemporary cultures of consumption. Consumers encounter a ready­
made world that requires almost no meaning­making labor, only the
magical transformation of the point­of­purchase where everything
comes completely refined, assembled, ready­to­eat–fully cooked, as
Claude Lévi­Strauss would say. The supermarket replaces the subject
of nature and the raw materials that would represent it, the traditional
ground of art, and this surely transforms meaning itself. Jean­Paul
Sartre offers one of the clearest articulations of the oldest ideas about
human meaning and the role of art: “If I fix on canvas or in writing a
certain aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on someone’s face
which I have disclosed, I am conscious of having produced them by
condensing relationships, by introducing order where there was none,
by imposing the unity of mind on the diversity of things. That is, I
feel myself essential in relation to my creation.”3 In Sartre’s example,
the artist looks on the inexplicable chaos of the natural landscape and
labors to make a human meaning through representation. The force of
Sartre’s formulation, however, is in the contrast between an utterly
inhuman earth and the profoundly human construction of meaning out
of raw materials that will be used to represent it. The artist labors to
make the world meaningful, but that very labor is itself a kind of unity
of action linking the inhuman and the human. This link is indexed in
38 Banash

the canvas or the poem where we see the struggle of the artist to
produce a coherent and meaningful vision; for Sartre, art creates a
meaningful relationship to the meaningless, inhuman natural world.4
Surely Cody’s Haiku is utterly different from this, for like
everyone in consumer culture, she confronts a world that is already
ordered, unnatural, and utterly human; it marks not an essential
relationship to an inhuman natural world but the very disappearance
of that nature. She finds no inhuman world through which to make
Sartre’s essential relationship. Moreover, there is little or no labor
with raw materials in Cody’s work, for she neither fixes on canvas or
in rhyme the contours of her encounter. She has not exactly made her
haiku; she has found it, and she simply shows it to us as if to show
what she has purchased. Taking away the raw materials of art, the
traditional subjects of the natural world, and the need for the more
traditional labors of making, refining, and ordering, consumer culture
strips away the need for those labors that have traditionally made life
meaningful. This is true for artists just as it is for almost every aspect
of anyone’s everyday life where we no longer work directly with
raw–or at least not wholly finished–materials.
Yet the liquidation of labor in the purchase of readymades is
only half the paradox. There is nothing more humanly and fully
organized than a store, no place where the artist seems less needed to
order experience. At first glance, Cody’s Haiku seems perhaps
needless, or not really hers. One might think that the role of art here is
simply unnecessary. Cody encounters fully­formed and finished
commodities with little connection to who made them or how they
were made, these commodities appear with meanings already fully
formed by brands, advertising, and prescribed uses that have already
been determined by others. Cody ironizes this, picking up the fully­
formed commodities, taking their brand­names and creating a nature
haiku that gestures at the very disappearance of the experience of
working with raw materials for the representation of the human in
relation to an inhuman landscape. Cody’s work suggests that
 Fragments 39

consumers do create meaning out of what they use, but do so in ways

that would be almost unrecognizable from Sartre’s traditionally
humanist perspective.
The question of Cody’s work is how to make a world
meaningful that has already been made. This is put most pivotally in
her best known work, American Alphabet. Created from the
trademarked fonts, she makes a complete alphabet from the first
letters of well­known American corporate brands. American Alphabet
demonstrates just how much of the meaning of contemporary life
comes ready­made, and how consumer culture provides a kind of
overwhelming meaning that the consumer finds as something
“given,” more accurately promised, something waiting to be bought.
The alphabet, the very form we use to spell out the meaning of the
world is presented as a privatized, corporate world of meaning that is
not made but waiting for us. Also telling is that the American
Alphabet is not the fonts of the State but of the corporate world of
consumer culture. While there is a playfulness in her work that draws
on the cheerfulness and playfulness of the advertising fonts
themselves, there is also a much darker allegory about how we make
meaning. Something that would seem much closer to a kind of raw
material of representation–the alphabet that might express almost
anything–is here depicted as a readymade. Each letter carries a wealth
of associations from branding and its complex play of fantasy about
what life should or might be were we only lucky enough to possess a
given detergent or bubblegum. Cody’s alphabet suggests that the
meaning of American life is spelled out through these commodities,
that we write a meaning through what we consume, but the alphabet
also clearly shows that those meanings are found waiting for us.
Unlike Sartre’s artist gazing into the landscape and making a
relationship to the inhuman, the American Alphabet shows that the
artist, and everyone else, steps into a mediascape of ready­made
meaning and must find a way to say something when the very
40 Banash

Heidi Cody, American Alphabet, 2000, heidicody.com. Reproduced

courtesy of the artist.
 Fragments 41

materials of any possible statement are already over­coded with the

messages of corporations and brands.
This is not just the problem of the consumer but also of
producers, for mass production deskills labor, cutting off even the
laborer from the very kinds of relationships between raw materials
and finished products that make, as traditionally held by Marxists in
particular, the final product meaningful. The more mass­production
techniques have succeeded, the more finished, ready­made things
there are displayed in ever more well­considered orders in ever more
stores. Yet the more we encounter these completed things in their
ordered ranks on the shelves–the more ready­made we find the
world–the more both laborers and consumers have to find new,
unprecedented strategies of making meaning. This problem gives rise
to two profoundly important and influential forms of modern art that
seek a solution to the problems of meaning in consumer culture: the
readymade and the collage. Both forms depend on the artist working
with materials that are ripped from their context, and, in the case of
collage, usually radically fragmented. For instance, there is a fantastic
violence of fragmentation in Cody’s American Alphabet. While each
letter seems simply a readymade in its own right, each letter has been
ripped out of the brand name it once spelled, and it is now used as a
fragment of a new whole. What makes collage a particularly modern
form is just this overt emphasis on the cut, ripped, and fragmented,
the way in which collage marks a violence that is so often not made
back into a seemingly organic whole but instead emphasizes the
fragmented and ready­made status of each element. For instance, a
sixteenth­century oil painting might well represent a still­life of many
incongruous commodities laying together in an improbable or even
violent arrangement, but the perspective of the painting, as well as its
unity of materials and techniques, covers over this and makes the
work far less disturbing and certainly less fragmented than the
modern technique of collage in which radically different elements,
42 Banash

materials, and styles are put together, all while leaving the seams to
show, emphasizing the very violence of the new arrangement.

Ancient Fragments
Material cultures have always produced a flotsam and jetsam of
fragments, as both Archaeology and Art History eloquently testify, but
not until the twentieth century do collage techniques become widely
used to create or reuse these fragments while simultaneously
emphasizing their status as ripped, torn, and broken readymades fitted
together in new and shocking wholes that, more often than not,
emphasize the seams equally with the glue. There are myriad forces
and circumstances at work in the invention and development of what
we today call collage, and to critically understand its development, it
is necessary to wrestle with how the basic element of collage, the
fragment, came to be grasped and employed so differently by modern
artists. Though modernism is certainly characterized by disjunctions,
discontinuity, and confusion–so well emblematized by fragmented art
forms and philosophies–perceptions of rupture, dismemberment, and
fragmentation structure some of the oldest myths that inform Western
thought: Osiris, Orpheus, and the Kabbalah’s Shevirah. Despite their
ancient status, these myths aptly show us that the anxieties of a
divided self and a fractured world are essentially primordial. Indeed,
many modernists and postmodernists turn to these three myths to
develop their own contemporary experiences of dislocation and
alienation.5 The pervasiveness of these myths cautions against any
yearning to imagine that previous eras experienced a comfortingly
meaningful and unified world. Yet the cultures that produced these
myths of fragmentation and alienation did not produce the kinds of art
we most associate with modern expressions of decidedly similar
perceptions.
The very concept of the fragment implies a dialectic of
universal and particular, whole and part. For many theorists, the
apprehension of a divided self is one of the most characteristic signs
 Fragments 43

of a modern sensibility cut off from belief in comforting or stable

universals. Freud’s study of the unconscious, Marx’s critique of
ideology, and Nietzsche’s genealogies all point to a new emphasis on
a divided self. Still, older myths of fragmentation reveal a decided
difference less in their obviously shared recognitions of that division
than in their attempts to frame the meaning of this rupture. Where
modernists place the emphasis on the experience of division by
foregrounding seemingly irresolvable particulars, these earlier myths
acknowledged this fragmentation while striving to resolve it into new
universals.
The story of Osiris is recorded in the Pyramid Texts, one of
the most ancient narratives to survive from Egypt. Though the story
undergoes many changes over millennia, most sources agree that
Osiris and his sister/wife Isis are the children of the earth god Geb
and the sky goddess Nut; together, they rule over Egypt until Osiris’s
death. While in some texts Osiris drowns in the Nile, in the more
popular and enduring version, he is killed by his scheming brother
Seth. Seth goes on to dismember Osiris’s body, scattering it
throughout Egypt. Isis gathers together all the fragments of his body
except the phallus, nonetheless conceives a son through them, and
Osiris himself becomes a god of the dead–often depicted with green,
rotting flesh. Tom Hare argues that we should see in Osiris’s
dismemberment an allegory for the particularly Egyptian sense of
fragmented identity reflected in the elaborate funerary rites of
mummification: “The mythical dismemberment of Osiris mimics
psychological and semiotic dismemberments constituting (even as
they threaten) Egyptian constructions of subjective consciousness.”6
Noting that the different organs of the body represent radically
different aspects of the personality, the process of mummification
must grasp each organ as something quite separate both
metaphorically and literally, and thus “the identification and
specification of the individual aspects of the subject suggest their
separability, even as pointing to separate parts of the body with
44 Banash

logographs in itself suggests the possibility of dismemberment”

(23–24). Hare’s point is compelling, especially since the story of
dismemberment is clearly more resonant for both ancients and
moderns. Yet while modern sensibilities tend to favor the drama of the
particular, in ancient contexts this perception of a fragmented self is
complemented by a dialectic between Osiris’s dismemberment and
the redemption of its wholeness by Isis. According to R. E. Witt, it is
Isis that is the real key to this myth, for “having pieced them together
with the magical skill that is particularly hers, she raises Osiris from
the dead and bestows upon him eternal life.”7 Thus the Greeks and
Romans adopted the mythology of Osiris with the emphasis on Isis’s
role as healer: “She was esteemed as the model spouse. She was
hymned as upholder of the marriage covenant … the tale of Isis and
Osiris, whatever the discrepancies of detail, contained just those
elements which for later antiquity could serve as the pattern of family
bonds of affection” (41). Instead of dwelling on a shattered Osiris, the
psychological trauma of his castration and dismemberment is an
opportunity for Isis to demonstrate her power to make whole.
Nonetheless, such a demonstration is a forceful reminder of its very
necessity.
There are enough similarities between the mythology of
Osiris and the later Greek poet­shaman Orpheus that some scholars
believe there is a strong link between them, but whether created
independently or sharing an evolutionary link, the story of Orpheus
again underscores the ancient sense of a fragmented consciousness
that manifests itself in the metaphor of literal dismemberment.
Orpheus is thought of first and foremost as a poet and musician, and
he is best known for sailing with the Argonauts, using his lyre to
triumph over the Sirens, and charming his way into Hades to free his
dead lover. He fails to free Eurydice from Hades when, at the last
moment, he looks back. Later, he is dismembered at the hands of
Thracian Maenads, ecstatic female worshippers of Dionysus. In both
his journey to the underworld and his death, there is a marked
 Fragments 45

resonance with Osiris. Yet despite the number of sources that recount
these incidents, the particulars of Orpheus and the meaning of his
myth remain confused. Was he a priest of Apollo or Dionysus, a
musician or a shaman, and was he dismembered in spite of or because
of his association with Dionysus? Different sources provide radically
different answers to these questions, though the best­known work in
English on Orpheus, W. K. C. Guthrie’s Orpheus and Greek Religion,
suggests these very confusions that characterize Orpheus reflect his
status as a divided figure. Informed by both the Apollonian and
Dionysian traits, Guthrie observes: “There are times when he seems
on the point of becoming merged with the lyre­playing god Apollo,
and others when, thinking of his death perhaps, we wonder whether
he is only an incarnation of the Thracian Dionysos.”8 The meaning of
the Orphic myth is this very division that so powerfully represents a
divided subject.
However, like Osiris, the figure of Orpheus both engages a
vision of a fractured subject while framing it with an emphasis on
ultimately greater unity. So while “Orpheus reflects Dionysos, yet at
every point seems to contradict him,”9 in most retellings, he
ultimately becomes a figure of unity and reconciliation through the
power of art, for as his head floats down the river in death, it still
speaks poetry, and thus the ancient function of the shaman to bridge
the division between this world and the next mediates the fractious
drives of a subject divided by the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
Indeed, Nietzsche also invokes the ultimate unity of both Apollonian
and Dionysian elements. In The Birth of Tragedy, he maintains: “With
what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have beheld him
[Dionysus]! With an astonishment that was all the greater the more it
was mingled with the shuddering suspicion that all this was actually
not so very alien to him after all, in fact, that it was only his
Apollonian consciousness which, like a veil, hid this Dionysian world
from his vision.”10 Like the myth of Osiris, the emphasis of Orpheus’s
dismemberment is finally a desire for unity: “His lyre carries the
46 Banash

music of universal harmony and eternal response. Seized by the god,

he speaks in no one voice of his own; possessed, he loses his self­
possession. Even Apollo must reveal himself to men in poem, oracle,
or trance, forms that no mortal finally controls. The mystery unites all
opposites, and bursts there where being and nothingness seem to
touch. This is why the pure Orphic voice always speaks as one.”11
While both Osiris and Orpheus provide powerful examples of
the divided subject, the Kabbalah’s shevirah, or breaking of the
vessels, offers a powerful allegory of a fallen and fragmented world.
Indeed, while many modern and postmodern artists have turned to the
myths of Osiris and Orpheus to explain or even structure their work,
critics beginning with Walter Benjamin in particular have been drawn
to the shevirah.
According to Isaac Luria, creation begins with God’s essence
imagined as light radiating into the pleroma, the space of the universe.
Ironically, to set the creation in motion, God performed the act of
tsimtsum, or self­limitation, and creation thus begins with God’s act of
exile. Still, some of the divine light escapes as sparks, called sefiroth,
representing divine qualities or potentialities: will, wisdom, intuition,
grace, judgment, compassion, eternity, and splendor. Each being has a
portion of these lights, called the shekhinah. However, the vessels that
are the material world proved too fragile to contain the force of the
shekhinah and they shattered, scattering the divine sparks. This
rupture, called shevirah, or “the breaking of the vessels,” represents a
fallen and fragmented universe of particulars sundered from divine
unity. The drama of creation becomes the tikkun, the desire to
reintegrate the fragments of creation with the unity of God. Gershom
Scholem explains that “since that primordial act, all being has been a
being in exile, in need of being led back and redeemed. The breaking
of the vessels continues into all the further stages of emanation and
Creation; everything is in some way broken, everything has a flaw,
everything is unfinished.”12 Even more emphatically than the myths
of Osiris and Orpheus, the Kabbalah powerfully imagines not only a
 Fragments 47

self but an entire world in fragments. Yet Scholem points out: “The
Kabbalists held that every religious act should be accompanied by the
formula: this is done ‘for the sake of the reunion of God and His
Shekhinah’” (108). Like other myths, the shevirah myth
acknowledges a divided and ruptured world but frames its meaning in
the desire for a transcendent unity.

Idolizing the Particular

From the universal to the particular, from unity to fragment, a shift in
emphasis is one of the most telling signs of modernity. Where the
ancient world constantly acknowledged fragmentation, it also
emphasized contexts to heal it. The role of the particular becomes
more pronounced as modernity develops, until a romantic like
Friedrich Schlegel could observe that “many works of the ancients
have become fragments. Many modern works are fragments at the
moment of their inception.”13 In ancient Egypt, one could harm an
enemy by writing their name on a bowl and then smashing it, but by
the eighteenth century, attitudes were changing radically toward
fragmented forms; indeed, incomplete sentimental novels, unfinished
poems, ruins, faux­ruins called follies, would all take the form of
fragments. Yet while fragments become more and more frequent in all
sorts of art, like the ancients, artists and audiences still look for larger
totalities to endow them with meaning. Elizabeth Harries brilliantly
explains this deeply ironic impulse in The Unfinished Manner: Essays
on the Fragment in The Later Eighteenth Century: “We tend to think
of fragmentary forms as radically discontinuous, reflecting a
discontinuous, unstable, uncentered universe. The world is in chaos,
and we represent that chaos in fragments. In the eighteenth century,
however, and even into the nineteenth, fragments were not necessarily
signs of a broken reality.”14 Rather than a fallen particular, the
fragment becomes synecdoche for an impossibly beautiful whole.
The fragmented works of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries are never stitched together out of myriad pieces. William
48 Banash

Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Samuel Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn

gesture toward a totality that is beyond the scope of the poems, their
incomplete status a memorial to a beauty the works invite us to
imagine but cannot embody. The fragments are perfect to the extent
that the whole could never sustain, and so the fragment becomes the
mirror out of which we conjure the perfect but unattainable ideal.15
Thus the folly must be the ruin of a single temple, the poem a
fragment of one great epic. To stitch together fragments of chance
materials that all make widely different gestures would crush the
sublime effect that depends so implicitly on the fantasy of a single,
impossible totality reduced to one particular. The fragment recognizes
our fallen and decaying world, but like the ancient myths it calls out
for the redemption in a beautiful whole.
The pastoral follies and epic gestures of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries are so melancholy, perhaps, because they
reach out toward beautiful wholes at a time of profound and violent
fragmentation of lifeworlds by an ever more emphatic change in
capitalism. They seize on the broken and the unfinished but look in it
for redemption from the shattering forces blossoming everywhere.
These forces of technology and capitalism made it more and more
difficult to emphasize psychic or mythic unities. Indeed, for Marshall
McLuhan, the trajectory of Western experience is at one with its
technologies of fragmentation. The hot mediums of movable type,
clocks, assembly lines, railroads, shipping networks, typewriters,
phonographs, photographs, film, and more are all mechanical
technologies that destroy our sense of unity and totality: “[T]he
principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or
the understanding of change. For mechanization is achieved by
fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a
series. Yet as David Hume showed in the eighteenth century, there is
no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows
another accounts for nothing.”16 Though for McLuhan alphabetic
writing culminating in movable type is the origin and explosion of
 Fragments 49

individuation in the West, the truly cataclysmic transformations of life

will develop with unprecedented speed at the turn of the nineteenth
century as all life is quickly industrialized. It is as if the social bodies
of the nineteenth century are vivisected in this unrelenting process:
“[T]he breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units in
order to produce faster action and change of form (applied
knowledge) has been the secret of Western power of man and nature
alike. This is the reason why our Western industrial programs have
quite involuntarily been so militant, and our military programs have
been so industrial” (85). McLuhan’s insight perfectly captures the
paradox of mass­production technologies and rising consumption, in
which more and more readymades create both literal and psychic
fragmentation precipitated by the rise of urban mediascapes and
cultures of vast consumption and waste.
The romantic reverence for the fragment with its kabbalistic
hopes of a divine beauty did not survive this paradox. The role of the
fragment and the aesthetic of modernism would be rewritten in a
world of unprecedented mechanization, production, and speed. While
myths and desires for unity and wholeness coordinating the ancient
world might have been embodied in collage, the brute reality of
scarcity made it unpracticable. The materials of modern collage are
themselves the detritus of vast mechanical operations of
fragmentation–scraps, buttons, tickets, magazine pages, photographs,
book pages, packaging, and more–in the ancient world such were
simply not ready to hand.17 Collage is the art of overproduction and
the unprecedented fragmenting wastes of consumerism. Its aesthetic
celebrates the incomplete; its willingness to find beauty in
irresolvable contractions or monstrous wholes is a mirror of the self
created by the fragmentation of working the assembly line, wandering
through the department store, or reading the newspaper and gleaning
in the streets for industrial objects rather than in pastoral fields for
grain.
50 Banash

Modernism in Production
The ancient world dreamed of lost unities, and if Osiris was torn to
bits, Isis would knit him back together. In the twentieth century, it was
not a jealous brother but an irresistible transformation of life and
production into the inhuman that would divide everyone. Indeed,
Marshall McLuhan observes: “The restructuring of human work and
association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the
essence of machine technology.”18 For McLuhan, as for Marx, we
become the reflections of our modes and means of production. In
Bodies and Machines, Mark Seltzer examines Henry Ford’s
production line, citing Ford himself: “The production of the Model T
required 7882 distinct work operations, but, Ford notes, only 12% of
these tasks–only 949 operations–required ‘strong, able­bodied, and
practically physically perfect men.’ Of the remainder … ‘we found
that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one­legged men, two
by armless men, 715 by one­armed men, and ten by blind men.’”19
Ford’s fantasy of shattered bodies piecing together the individual,
serially­produced parts of cars would be played out literally on the
battlefields of World War I, the first fully­mechanized war in history.
The militant energies of mechanical technologies turned fully on the
body, mass producing the fragments of Ford’s imagination, marrying
the literally shattering powers of hot technologies with the ideological
powers of mass media in the forms of radio, newspaper, photograph,
and film. The confluence of ideology and artillery, and their
seemingly indistinguishable methods and effects, would provoke the
dadaists to reimagine the body itself.
The worship of Fordism and regularized, mechanistic parts
and moments of production would become a machine aesthetic
aligned with production. Often horrifying but simultaneously
compelling, the breakdown of the body into constituent parts, or the
wholesale replacement of bodies by machine parts, was characteristic
of it. Francis Picabia would express this in his endless series of
industrial parts and implements, often given a proper name, or simply
 Fragments 51

labeled “femme.” For Siegfried Kracauer, this obsession with the

fragmentation was not the province of avant­garde art, but rather the
key obsession of popular culture. His analysis of the Tiller Girls
chorus line could be just as easily applied to everything from silent
comedies to the musicals of Busby Berkeley. Describing inhuman
choreography of synchronized and uniformed bodies high­stepping or
kicking in a glitzy parody of the assembly line, Kracauer observes: “It
is the mass that is employed here. Only as parts of a mass, not as
individuals who believe themselves to be formed from within, do
people become fractions of a figure.”20 Thus even the popular culture
saw a future emerging in which individuals were subordinated to the
mass in a way that broke down bodies and psyches into mere
fragments. In a telling observation that powerfully echoes Ford’s
fantasies of fragmented men, Kracauer writes of the popular chorus
line: “The Tiller Girls can no longer be reassembled into human
beings after the fact. Their mass gymnastics are never performed by
the fully preserved bodies, whose contortions defy rational
understanding. Arms, thighs, and other segments are the smallest
component parts of the composition” (78). He concludes that this is a
true mirror of anti­organic, unnatural capitalist production, which
“does not rise purely out of nature,” and so “it must destroy the
natural organisms that it regards either as means or as resistance”
(76). The machine aesthetic was profoundly a part of avant­garde art,
and while usually these works are animated by vigorous critique,
there is too a kind of subterranean embrace and pleasure in such
shattering processes as well.
Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head: The Spirit of Our Time
most powerfully incarnates the militarism and industrial remaking of
a profoundly fragmented subject. A wigmaker’s mannequin stares
blindly with its blank eyeballs. The features are abstracted, indistinct.
The wooden head is just that, without body, interiority, or desire–the
androgynous mind and face ready­made to the needs of mass
production. It has no name, but simply a number in a series, 22.
52 Banash

Raoul Hausmann, The Spirit of Our Time (Mechanical Head) [Der

Geist unserer Zeit (Mechanischer Kopf)], 1919. Musee National d’Art
Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © 2012 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Art Resource, New York.
 Fragments 53

Attached to the blank features are objects, each a synecdoche for

mechanical fragmentation and control. Its right ear is represented by
the font cylinder from a printing mechanism, suggesting the reams of
newspapers, books, receipts, identification papers, and other printed
documents that constitute the reality of the moment. A screw projects
from the temple at a queasy angle: this head feels no pain; it is just the
chassis of an information­processing machine. Just above it, the
movement from a watch conjures up the standardized time of
industrial regularity–the deadlines, the hours of banks and factories,
the divisions of the day into units of calculation. The forehead is
divided by a vertical tape measure, repeating the theme of the watch,
for space too is regularized, measured, and as standardized as the face
and thought of the head itself. At the very crown, a collapsible tin cup
is extended, presenting the profile of a funnel or perhaps a lens. In
either case, it seems to be a conduit to fill the blank head from the
outside but also from above, as if the forces that control it must
indeed look down from a high place. Camera parts, echoing the visual
media of photography and film that define those powerful visual
mediums, have replaced its left ear. A nail is also driven into the left
side of the head, another instance of violent penetration. Behind the
left ear, a ruler rises up, giving the impression of an antenna. This
head is radio­controlled, yet whatever signals it receives, the figure of
the ruler suggests they are measured, regulated, and subject to precise
standards.
Curiously, the eyes of the head remain troublingly blank, its
ears alone replaced by visual media, and one wonders why Hausmann
failed to replace those eyes as he has the ears, perhaps covering them
with lenses? Yet, turning to McLuhan, Hausmann’s choice seems
confirmed by the deeper structures of modernism’s media. For
McLuhan, the ear is the most delicate, emotionally nuanced, and
involved human sense. He associates it with the tribal, the preliterate,
the amodern. The ear conjures up the totality of human intersubjective
relations and negotiations that print can never capture. McLuhan sees
54 Banash

the ear as the conduit to oral humanities’ “inner world … a tangle of

complex emotions and feelings that the Western practical man has
long ago eroded or suppressed within himself in the interest of
efficiency and practicality” (50).21 Replacing the oral with the visual
carries out that suppression. The visual mediums of print, film, and all
mechanized processes create inhuman detachment and dampen
emotion, fragmenting not only the outer world of things, but also the
inner world of subjectivity: the visual “enables them to move from
thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement”
(79). He takes this idea even further in saying, “The literate man or
society develops the tremendous power of acting in a matter with
considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement
that a nonliterate man or society would experience” (79). Hausmann’s
head has had its ears replaced by the eyes of printing and film, but its
blind eyeballs stare out, totally detached, even from the piercing pain
of those nails and screws driven into it–the perfectly detached visual
subject, ready for the horrors of either the assembly line or the front
line.
Much of the power of Hausmann’s head comes from its
fragmented materials. There is no craft in this construction. The artist
did not sculpt it in marble or cast it in bronze. Indeed, such a unified
work would much diminish the impact of it. In part, the head speaks
so loudly because its subject and critique are the very things from
which it is made. Its cyborg theme is science fiction, but the everyday
objects of the watch, the print cylinder, the ruler, and camera are all
there. In everyday life, these are banal objects and tools, barely
remarked upon, as we are largely unconscious of their tremendous
force.22 Hausmann collages these readymades together, bringing them
to violently fix on the head, forcefully reminding us that they now
constitute our actual selves, piercing our very temples. We are already
cyborgs: utterly, numbly, and horrifically transformed.
Hausmann’s head is utterly unlike the gorgeous clockwork
automatons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.23 Though the
 Fragments 55

eighteenth century was taken with clockwork metaphors, and even

argued for a watchmaker god, those toys and automatons, like the
writing boy, concealed their mechanism underneath the craft of art.
Their bodies are complete, their faces of wood and porcelain detailed,
individual, and unique. They wear the finest clothes, their bodies
whole, and the clockwork mechanisms are hidden from the eyes.
They make every attempt to become human flesh, and it seems that
they are meant to comfort us. Their mechanisms are perfectly
comprehensible but always concealed so that we do not confront their
mechanical abjection, assured that a kindly toy­making god watches
over a rational world just as we watch over their amusing exploits of
playing a piano or writing their own name. Hausmann’s head is blank,
decapitated from the body, and violently modified. There is grim
humor in it, but little comfort. Its ability to incarnate fragmented
subjectivity from the readymades of industrial society demonstrates
the profoundly new relationship of the subject and the artist to the
fragment in the twentieth century.

Postmodern Consumption
The fragmented subjectivity of mass production is only one side of a
dialectical process. The fragmentation of the assembly line leads to
the shelves of the department store and the mass consumption of both
things and images. At a moment of critical mass, mass­produced
commodities, from durable goods like cars to ephemeral media such
as newspapers, demand consumers who purchase and use these
commodities less to satisfy basic needs than to engage in the
fundamentally aesthetic work of exchanging signs. Though
production and consumption form a true dialectic, the course of the
twentieth century marks the movement of this spinning pair. In the
first half of the century, the subject is clearly production. The art, the
ethos, and indeed the very spirit of the time are centered on
production. For conservatives, the hero is the captain of industry,
while for progressives it is the worker hero. From whichever side the
56 Banash

artist approaches culture, production is at the center of

consciousness.24 With the Depression and World War II, these
productive powers would be kept as the major term until the 1950s.
The consumer here seems almost an afterthought, the minor term,
necessary but truly insignificant next to the giant forces of
industrialization. However, with the end of the war, there is a
shocking reversal. The consumer becomes the subject and production
is the minor term, the object that merely allows the consumer to
realize itself in an orgy of shopping. It is difficult today to imagine
just how profoundly this shift affected everyday life in late 1940s and
throughout the 1950s, and how American popular culture in particular
radically transformed because of it.25 One sure mark is the decline of
the inventor heroes like Thomas Edison or tycoons like Nelson
Rockefeller and the adulation accorded to the emerging field of
advertising. By the end of the 1950s, Madison Avenue is as easily
associated with glamour as Hollywood starlets. Critics were painfully
aware of, and unnerved by, this change. Vance Packard built a career
watching the wheel turn in a series of books including The Hidden
Persuaders, The Status Seekers, and most powerfully, The Waste
Makers.
Published in 1960, The Waste Makers begins with the
dystopian “City of the Future.” Packard projects himself into an
America of tomorrow, “Cornucopia City.” In this new reality of over­
production, factories are “located on the edge of a cliff, and the ends
of their assembly lines can be swung to the front or rear doors
depending on public demand.”26 Buildings made of papier­mâché
“can be torn down and rebuilt every spring,” and cars are made of
plastic “that develops fatigue and begins to melt if driven more than
four thousand miles” (4). People shop in “a titanic push­button super
mart built to simulate a fairyland,” (5) buying so much that these
super marts must contain numerous “receptacles where the people can
dispose of the old­fashioned products they bought on a previous
shopping trip” (5). Packard’s fantasy from a half­century ago is eerie
 Fragments 57

in its accuracy, and he fully understands the dynamics that others

would go on to call the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Packard
observes: “The people of the United States are in a sense becoming a
nation on a tiger. They must learn to consume more and more or, they
are warned, their magnificent economic machine may turn and devour
them. They must be induced to step up their individual consumption
higher and higher whether they have any pressing need for the goods
or not. Their ever­expanding economy demands it” (6). The heroic
work is, ironically, no longer that of the mighty industrialist or worker
who must vanquish scarcity with vision and muscle, but upon the
consumer, who must meet the demands of consumption with an ever­
expanding capacity of hedonistic desire. In short, the consumer must
become especially wasteful, buying what is not needed, discarding
what is not broken, and engaging in an unprecedented relationship to
abundance–to an endless series of ready­made things. As Packard puts
it, “the only sure way to meet all the demands may be to create a
brand new breed of super customers” (11). Much of Packard’s book is
taken up with an analysis of how marketers work to produce the
desire that will fuel the economy, and how people give over to the
insecurities and pleasures of consumption. While Packard discloses
the collusion between engineered obsolescence and the imperatives of
fashion, it is Jean Baudrillard, writing eight years later, who most
fully understands this new dialectic from the side of its subjects:
consumers.
In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Jean
Baudrillard accounts for this labor of consumption: “[U]nder this
paradoxical determination, objects are not the locus of the satisfaction
of needs, but of a symbolic labor.”27 Baudrillard realizes what Vance
Packard only suspects, that consumption is no longer a process of
satisfying needs, but a symbolic labor of meaning carried out through
a complex play of identification and transgression of ephemeral
styles. Like the modern artist, the consumer too works with ready­
made elements, picking and choosing, sometimes in obedience to a
58 Banash

code, but just as often entering into aesthetic transgressions: “That is

to say, they use it [symbolic codes] in their own way: they play with
it, they break its rules, they speak it with their class dialect” (37).
Baudrillard’s emphasis on the role of ready­made commodities and
the labor of making them speak for the consumer is particularly useful
to understanding the role of collage in a ready­made world of
consumer goods of all kinds. Baudrillard is at pains to emphasize the
role of these commodities over and above less tangible sorts of
cultural capital (like vocabularies, worldviews, attitudes, etc.): “Thus
objects, their syntax, and their rhetoric refer to social objectives and
to a social logic. They speak to us not so much of the user and of
technical practices, as of social pretension and resignation, of social
mobility and inertia, of acculturation and enculturation, of
stratification and of social classification. Through objects, each
individual and each group searches out his­her place in an order, all
the while trying to jostle this order according to a personal trajectory.
Through objects a stratified society speaks” (38).
Baudrillard imagines the consumer selecting from a vast
system of commodities, playing with an arrangement of objects, from
refrigerators to couches, clothes to cars, in negotiating a symbolic and
imaginary place in the world. Like the collage artist who selects
ready­made elements to make a new statement, the consumer
assembles a provisional totality out of an infinite number of
individual fragments, literally shopping (or sometimes scavenging,
stealing, or faking) new identities.
If Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head represents the hot
media of modernity fragmenting and emptying subjectivity for the
needs of production, it is Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It That
Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? that captures the
cool, all­inclusive, symbolic involvements of ready­made
consumption. Hamilton’s collage has become an icon, a resonant
image of the hedonistic consumer culture so apparent by the mid­
1950s. What is truly remarkable about it, moreover, is that both its
 Fragments 59

Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So

Different, So Appealing? 1956. Kunsthalle, Tübingen, Collection
Zundel. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS,
London. Art Resource, New York.
60 Banash

themes and its very production incarnate a profoundly new

relationship to both consumer culture and art itself.
Hamilton’s collage was created for the London show entitled
This is Tomorrow, and the exhibition’s aims were frankly postmodern.
As Lawrence Alloway saw it, “Mondrian, the Bauhaus and Le
Corbusier all needed recuperating and re­utilizing for a new
generation, and the principles of that recuperation were to be non­
specialized, transient, impure, provisional, expendable, multi­channel,
simultaneous, and even antagonistic towards each other … an antidote
to purity, the golden section, and clear iconography.”28 Though
modernist artists too had incorporated elements of mass culture and
advertising into their works, they did so under the sign of production,
seeking to aestheticize the everyday, and thus redeem it under the
signature of the artist. Curiously, Alloway himself sees this strain of
modernism as the minor term to be set against those heroes of
production, Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, and it is not difficult to see
the point when we are told that Hamilton’s collage found its home in
a room that contained a sixteen­foot reproduction of Robbie the
Robot, Marilyn Monroe’s most famous pose from The Seven Year
Itch, and a jukebox.29 This is Tomorrow is often thought of as the
institutional beginning of the pop art that would define the sixties, and
it is fascinating to compare these kinds of images to the seminal First
International Dada Fair in June 1920, in which a dummy wearing a
German military uniform and a pig’s head floats over the hall. That
kind of immediate critical engagement, unmistakable in both its tone
and message, is lost here. Are we to find Robbie and Marilyn, the
postmodern Caliban and the ultimate celluloid siren as objects of
satire and biting political protest, or are we invited first to laugh but
finally to affirm them? If dada is politics, pop art is better understood
as camp, which Susan Sontag defines as a sensibility: “Indeed the
essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and
exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric–something of a private code, a
badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”30 This seems a
 Fragments 61

much less baffling way to understand Marilyn and Robbie. While

camp has its subversive side, undermining essential identities, it does
not do so through overt critique or satire. Rather, it affirms
performative exaggerations, and so “camp taste identifies with what it
is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the
thing they label as “a camp,” they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender
feeling” (291–292). This is a much gentler, and perhaps ultimately
less militant, form of avant­garde practice. It both demands and
reflects the cool sensibility of the sixties, one that promotes process
and engagement, described almost exactly in those same “multi­
channel” terms Alloway invokes. “Cool media are high in
participation or completion by the audience” (McLuhan 23). This
kind of participation is vital to camp, which does not attempt to
preach, but to invite the audience into camp sensibilities that are
paradoxically subversive and affirmative in the same gesture.
In the midst of this camp room, Hamilton’s tiny collage
floated, its impact seemingly disproportionate to its diminuitive size.
Yet in the almost miniature dimensions of his collage is the iconic
embodiment that Baudrillard names the labor of consumption. Its very
production, fascinatingly, mirrors the process of shopping itself, for
Hamilton had provided his wife a list of images, which she collected
from popular magazines, and the list included: “Man, Woman,
Humanity, Food, Newspapers, Cinema, TV, Telephone, Comics
(picture information), Works (textual information), Tape Recording
(aural information), Cars, Domestic Appliance, Space” (Taylor 162).
Along with a friend, his wife compiled ready­made images carefully
clipped, and presented them to her husband, who then simply selected
and arranged them, speaking the commodity with his own accent.
Hamilton’s collage condenses the experiences, anxieties, and
perhaps the aspirations of a world defined by media, consumption,
and a hedonistic–perhaps masochistic–desire for pleasure in
consumption. The images themselves are brought together in the form
of an unlikely living room, the context clearly private rather than
62 Banash

public. Through the window, we see a black­and­white marquee

advertising the first sound film, Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, but it
seems our couple no longer needs to go to the famous Warners’
Theatre, for they have television and a reel­to­reel tape recorder in
their own colorful space. They are surrounded by brand names and
corporate logos: Hoover, Tootsie Pop, Ford. The man, a phallic
bodybuilder, and woman, a pin­up, are almost naked, both defined by
their exaggerated bodies. Their very unnaturalness suggests they have
turned themselves into products, both defined by the imperatives of
advertising, stylizing themselves like the car or the vacuum. The
world itself is shattered, reduced to the dimensions of the fragmented
mosaic of TV. A sliver of a globe hovers over them, suggesting not
only a dawning space age, but their utter distance from traditional
geography, as if their room floats away from the earth itself, a
powerful metaphor for the mediatization of everyday life that
constantly brings fragments of the world inside the domestic. Indeed,
while a sea of bodies on a sandy beach plays the role of a carpet, it
looks like nothing so much as the static of a dead channel. Their
bodies stand inside this banal but ultramodern pleasuredome, and they
look out with expressions of seemingly drugged self­satisfaction that
do not meet each other’s or the viewer’s eyes.
This is a very different vision from Raoul Hausmann’s
Mechanical Head, for it lacks the brutality and violence. Rather than
the external imposition of cybernetic appendages, this couple seems
to have fully and completely internalized the imperatives of
commodity culture, transforming themselves from within–playfully
adorning themselves and their space with the modes of modern media
and advertising. They have remade their bodies in their own pursuit of
pleasure, becoming one­dimensional icons as fully as the cartoons on
the cover of Young Romance that hangs on their wall. Unlike the
painful and violent nails and screws that pierce the head, these bodies
are hedonistic, trapped not by the violence of production, but
consumption’s insistence on ever­greater indulgence. While
 Fragments 63

Hausmann’s head provokes fears about the fragmenting violence of

production, the couple in the dream house seems a perverse
fragmentation of pleasures. Indeed, this was the fundamental
neoconservative fear as they watched the dialectic of American
capitalism turn production on its head and create the new super­
customer for the culture of mass consumption. In The Cultural
Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell observes that “once mass
consumption and a high standard of living were seen as the legitimate
purpose of economic organization. Selling became the most striking
activity of contemporary America. Against frugality, selling
emphasized prodigality; against asceticism, the lavish display.”31
Bell’s jeremiad describes the very same world that McLuhan and
Baudrillard observe, but his horror of it is apparent. Hamilton, too, is
describing this new world in his fragmented collage, but his attitude is
far less clear, seeming to fall more softly with something like camp
rather than critique.

Readymades
Like the assembly line worker, the artist of the readymade is
deskilled; the process of making art is reduced from a complex craft
to a decontextualized gesture. Choose a commodity and name it art.
In the form of a more complex collage, readymades are simply
brought together, and here the artist resembles the consumer, bringing
together these fragments in order to assemble lifestyles in the
possibilities of selection and arrangement. Using ready­made objects
to create even the most critical responses to new economic and
technological realities, the collage process itself nonetheless remains
a mirror, reflecting the attendant fragmentation of mass production,
the labor of consumption, and consumption as the production of
identity. William C. Seitz, curator of the landmark exhibition The Art
of Assemblage, observes that “just as the introduction of oil painting
in fifteenth­century Flanders and Italy paralleled a new desire to
reproduce the appearance of the visible world, collage and related
64 Banash

modes of construction manifest a predisposition that is

characteristically modern.”32 In the pages above, I have tried to read
this dialectic in the Mechanical Head and Today’s Homes, but I would
like to develop this analysis by looking closely at the origins of the
readymade at the beginning of the century in the work of Marcel
Duchamp and the century’s end with the work of Sarah Sze.
Two of the most iconic images of modern art were created by
Marcel Duchamp in the first years of the twentieth century, and both
have come to stand as perfect synecdoche for just about all the
absurdities, realities, and ambitions of the avant­garde: Bicycle Wheel
of 1913 and Fountain of 1917. Duchamp came to call them
readymades, and while they mark the radical critique and rupture of
modernist art, they also speak to the fragmentation of the world, to the
larger dynamics of production that would animate and define the early
twentieth century. The Bicycle Wheel did not begin as a readymade,
and still less as a work of art. Living in Paris in 1913, Duchamp
recalls that it was a personal experiment with chance and sensibility.
Indeed, he claims that he had no intention of showing it as a work of
art in its own right, but rather “it was simply letting things go by
themselves and having a sort of created atmosphere in a studio, an
apartment where you live. Probably, to help your ideas come out of
your head.”33 Seen in pictures, or in one of its motionless museum
exhibits, it is easy to forget that the wheel itself would spin and turn
under Duchamp’s hand, that it was a kind of machine, though if not a
machine for moving, certainly one for thinking. Though the original is
lost, Duchamp constructed several more examples over the years: the
wheel of a bicycle set in its fork is turned upside down, mounted to a
small stool. “I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I
enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoyed looking at the flames dancing
in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the
movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of flames”
(qtd. in Hopps et al. 588).
 Fragments 65

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1963. Collection of Richard

Hamilton, Henley­on­Thames, Great Britain. © 2012 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel
Duchamp. Art Resource, New York.
66 Banash

In large measure, the initial shock of Bicycle Wheel is caught

up with the fragmentation: to create the work, the bicycle, that most
rational and modern machine is taken to pieces, fragmented, the
single wheel separated from its twin and turned up off the ground,
stripped of its tire. The purpose of the wheel, to bear a body
gracefully over the ground, is utterly shattered, seemingly against all
reason, absurdly confined to a single spot. The stool itself is similarly
contradicted, its purpose as a seat negated; it becomes a support for
that spinning wheel, and it seems to provoke a perverse desire to turn
the whole thing over like a child’s toy and set that motion right again.
Duchamp’s work does not seem to sit easily with readings
that emphasize that the artist of readymades is merely a consumer,
transubstantiating the ordinary into a work of art in a kind of black
mass of consumption. This idea of the readymade is aptly and
emphatically formulated by Octavio Paz: “The ‘ready­mades’ are
anonymous objects which the gratuitous gesture of the artist, by the
simple act of choosing them, converts into ‘works of art.’”34 Paz and
similar explanations by critics like Peter Bürger see only the signature
and miss the literal content of such works. The bicycle wheel is not so
simply an object, in the wholeness and unity that particular word
conjures for us. This first readymade was an engagement with the
parts of modern machines, ripped from their context, taken to bits,
applied to new purposes. Its very existence is premised on both mass
production of standardized objects and the very ways that process
fragments the world. The wheel is not merely an exercise in the
signature, for the machine works in a new way, and Duchamp himself
would set it spinning. This seems quite different from what
Baudrillard describes as the symbolic labor of consumption, and it
belongs rather to those early years of the century which were still
more fascinated with production: the industrialist, the worker, and the
machine more than the consumer and the moment of shopping. To
possess an object like Bicycle Wheel is quite unlike the desire for
stylish elements that define exaggerated consumer identities:
 Fragments 67

fashionable clothes, cars, or sleek appliances. Duchamp did not just

choose, he broke apart and reassembled as a tinker, and the bicycle
wheel is not just a signifier, it too functions and makes–a machine that
produces thought. The revolving wheel would remain a constant in
Duchamp’s life and work, preceding its status as a readymade, and
only later acquiring the name. It would be Fountain of R. Mutt that
would crystallize the shattering force of gesture and signature.
Unlike Bicycle Wheel, Duchamp’s Fountain was conceived as
a ready­made work of art even before it was purchased. Fleeing the
destruction of World War I, Duchamp had come to New York in 1915,
and by 1917 he was deeply involved with the American Society of
Independent Artists. Like the Salon des indépendants in Paris, the
American association cultivated an anti­academic radicalism and
claimed that it would exhibit the work of any artist willing to pay a
six­dollar fee. Duchamp, a member of the board of directors, put them
to the test, anonymously submitting a urinal signed “R. Mutt, 1917.”
The work was rejected, just as the Salon had rejected Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase in 1912. Duchamp promptly resigned,
and then had Alfred Stieglitz photograph Fountain for inclusion in
The Blind Man. Shortly thereafter the original disappeared, but the
work would continue to generate argument and frame key aesthetic
debates for the rest of the century.35 Like Bicycle Wheel, Duchamp’s
work has been taken largely as a critique of institution and the
concept of art itself. The most frequently reiterated interpretations
suggest that Fountain tells us that, in the art world, the emperor has
no clothes. Peter Bürger maintains: “When Duchamp signs mass­
produced objects (a urinal, a bottle drier) and sends them to art
exhibits, he negates the category of individual production. The
signature, whose very purpose it is to mark what is individual in the
work, that it owes its existence to this particular artist, is inscribed on
an arbitrarily chosen mass­produced product, because all claims to
individual creativity are to be mocked.”36 While Duchamp is
68 Banash

Beatrice Wood, The Blind Man (No. 2), May 1917. The Louise and
Walter Arensberg Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Courtesy
of Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts / Happy Valley Foundation. Art
Resource, New York.
 Fragments 69

doubtless testing the limits of art and institutions, the readymades are
anything but arbitrarily chosen.
Duchamp’s Fountain is a readymade but it is also a fragment,
an emphatically industrial fragment. It is a small piece of the
discreetly concealed machinery of everyday life in a country whose
only works of art “are her plumbing and her bridges.”37 Duchamp did
not simply walk into a department store and choose a fashionable, or
even an unfashionable, item that anyone might purchase. Though the
work is premised on mass production and consumption, the major
term is surely production. The only likely consumer of this object at
the point­of­sale is the contractor installing a bathroom, and it is all
but unthinkable that this anonymous fixture could be interpreted as a
consumer’s performance of identity or indulgence of hedonistic
acquisition. Indeed, one of the most striking things about the urinal is
that it would be unlikely to find it in any private residence, but only in
the most anonymous public spaces. It is one of the few objects that
would seem completely out of place in Richard Hamilton’s Just What
Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?
The signature itself is not Duchamp’s, for Fountain is signed
“R. Mutt.” Writing in the 1917 The Blind Man, Louise Norton
collaborated in the fiction: “To those who say that Mr. Mutt’s exhibit
may be Art, but is it the art of Mr. Mutt since a plumber made it? I
reply simply that the Fountain was not made by a plumber but by the
force of an imagination.”38 Duchamp himself, although leaving the
commentary anonymous by not signing his name to the editorial,
wrote about the affair in the same issue: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his
own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE
[emphasis in original] it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it
so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and
point of view–created a new thought for that object” (5). There is a
quiet but emphatic slippage of meaning in this formulation, a
metonymic resonance between types of work that grows into a telling
metaphor about production in art. Mr. Mutt is presented as either a
70 Banash

plumber or, perhaps, the factory worker, who made the urinal himself.
In either case, his fictitious identity is deeply associated with the
worker, the maker of things. The productive powers of the artisan,
however, become artistic at the moment they provoke new thoughts
through a choice–presenting the urinal to us as Fountain. Yet this is
not a performance of artistic identity but the actual work of the artist
who makes new thoughts possible. For Duchamp the artist is above
all a producer, someone who heroically makes. This becomes clearer
in Duchamp’s final lines in the article, “The only works of art
America has given are her plumbing and her bridges” (5). This
emphasis on making and producing is evident throughout Duchamp,
and especially so in his readymades. Indeed, for Thierry de Duve, the
question of production was paramount, and Duchamp always faced a
series of questions about the process and production of painting in
particular: “to become a painter/to cease to paint, to play the artist/to
produce ‘antiart,’ to shut up/to let others speak about oneself, and so
on. These strategies would always refer the pictorial product to its
conditions of production, art movements to the history that orients
them.”39
For Duchamp, the readymade emerges from the machinery of
everyday life, and its background is the transformations of modern
assembly lines, serial production, and the obsession with methods and
plans for production. Readymades, assemblage, and collage reflect
the violence of these processes and their effects on every aspect of
life. These effects were part of the shattering of lifeworlds that would
culminate in World War I and transform the major cities of the world.
In Marcel Duchamp, Dawn Ades, Neil Cox, and David Hopkins
rehearse one of the dominant interpretations of the readymades,
considering in particular the motions of Bicycle Wheel and the
invitation of Comb: “these repeatable and perhaps pleasurable actions
both symbolize and undermine the unhealthy appetites and false
needs Karl Marx stated that capitalist commodity production and the
‘consumer society’ would generate, whereby the consumer is seduced
 Fragments 71

into a purchase of (erotic) satisfaction ... such promises are made in

advertisements or shop windows.”40 This line of interpretation seems
to put the emphasis on a consumption that would only play such a
vigorous role later. It is difficult to imagine a list of objects less likely
to produce erotic consumer desire in either shop windows or
advertisements than most of Duchamp’s readymades, which are
almost all tools, fixtures, or machines. Indeed, all of these objects
have the tenor of making, of the machined contexts of everyday life,
and Duchamp’s statements often seem to suggest his own thought
running in industrial lines: “Look for a ready­made/which weighs a
weight/chosen in advance/first decide on a/weight for each year/and
force all readymades/of the same year/to be the same weight” (qtd. in
Ades et al. 156). In these and other comments, Duchamp engages the
kind of mad, fragmenting perspectives that define Fordism and
contradict the norms of art in which the object should only serve its
own completely individual and internal necessities. He instead adopts
the language and urgencies of the manufacturer’s obsessive and
utilitarian standardizing to the needs of the factory and its shattering
effects on those who serve the factory’s relentless inhuman demands.
By the end of the century, the readymade would move out of
the factory context and instead they would be plucked from the store
shelves of consumer culture, and works by artists like Heidi Cody and
Sarah Sze confirm, develop, and complicate the readymades of
Marcel Duchamp and the historical avant­garde by coming full circle.
Unlike Warhol and other pop artists who reproduced with loving craft
commercial advertising or packaging in a complex trompe l’oeil,
Sarah Sze simply presents us with the objects of everyday shopping.
She works exclusively with readymades, but not with Duchamp’s
thematics of production, or his parsimony. Rather than a single box or
a discreet lightbulb, her readymade assemblages comprise thousands
of unaltered commodities pulled directly off the store shelves. The art
of Sarah Sze engages serial consumption, and she seems to find both
the horror and lyricism in a society of consumer excess. Any one of
72 Banash

her installations might be best imagined as emptying a suburban home

and artfully arranging its myriad things. In his book On Paradise
Drive, talking head David Brooks observes: “At some point in the
past decade, the suburbs went quietly berserk. As if under the
influence of some bizarre form of radiation, everything got huge. The
cars got huge, so heads don’t even spin when a mountainous Hummer
comes rolling down the street. The houses got huge. The drinks at 7­
Eleven got huge, as did the fry containers at McDonald’s. The stores
turned into massive, sprawling category­killer megaboxes with their
own climatic zones.”41 Brooks’s observation would come as no
surprise to Vance Packard, who was observing in 1960 that “[t]he
great challenge in the United States–and soon in Western Europe–is to
cope with a threatened overabundance of the staples and amenities
and frills of life” (7). This unending stream of serial acquisition
defines American life, as consumers shuttle between their enormous
houses and the big­boxes that feed them serially­produced goods, a
river of things flowing ceaselessly in and out of their lives. If
Duchamp was fascinated with the production and machinery of
everyday life, Sarah Sze turns her eyes toward the unprecedented
demands of consumption on our actual everyday activity. Because we
live in a world of insistent consumption, the entire culture of objects
defines a flow: the movement from purchase to waste. As Packard
describes it in his book, manufacturers and advertisers have spent all
their time trying to overcome any proclivities we might have toward
conservation. We are enjoined to buy and then to waste, and this
process is so relentless that we have only a vague idea of the sheer
scope and weight of the objects that define our lives. Packard quotes
the chanting voice of a deodorant commercial from 1960: “‘You use it
once and throw it away. . . . You use it once and throw it away’” (42).
The disposable life described by glossy advertisements leads
to a stark confrontation with death, as everything, or so it seems,
passes on and out of our lives, every dead lightbulb, single­serving
creamer, and deodorant pad a perceptible allegory of our own
 Fragments 73

inevitable death: each purchase a hopeful rebirth. Little wonder that

American culture is ever more youth­obsessed. In this postmodern
culture of endless consumption, the conservationist and the collector
are perverse figures, attempting to arrest this ceaseless flow of
objects, to dam up the river of supply, to hold onto the old, the out­of­
fashion, the ephemeral. Sarah Sze is not a collector or a
conservationist, but her lyrical assemblages and installations
illuminate the meaning of consumption and collecting, giving us a
powerful image of the “just­in­time” supply chains of our lives and
the remarkable rhythms of consumption that remain completely
obscure until we confront them in the constellation of a collection.
Indeed, I will try to show how her work ultimately seems to suggest a
spatial representation of the rhythms of contemporary everyday life
by gathering together its ready­made fragments.
One of Sarah Sze’s earliest works connects her closely to the
visual codes of collections. As a little­known emerging artist, Sze was
given a small corner space in New York’s 1996 SoHo Annual
organized by Pratt Artist’s League.42 Working entirely with toilet
paper, she twisted and tied this most ephemeral material into dozens
of shapes: oblong tubes, small caps, tiny spheres, loops, lumps, and
tails. Taking over a cramped hallway, she displayed the objects ranked
in rows, as if each was part of a distinct group. It puts one in mind of
shelves of bones in a museum of natural history, or the collector
arranging groups of precious objects in careful categories. Yet the
material itself ironizes these associations of permanence and eternal
value. After all, her material is toilet paper, itself the ultimate
metonym of waste, a material destined to decompose almost at a
touch. Looking again, the intensive arrangements seem to underscore
the attentions and motions of the collector, the categorizer, as each
object and its arrangement mark not value, but the time and attention
of the artist. Covering the floors, climbing the walls, overwhelming
the shelves, Sze’s work is an index of obsessive attention, making
visible the rhythms of time. In this reading, its material is not ironic.
74 Banash

The ephemeral paper is only a slightly more durable, visible marker

for the artist’s hand–the instrument of attention.
Like Duchamp’s readymades, Sze’s work does not consider
these objects for inherent beauty. And, unlike other artists of collage
and assemblage, there is no narrative element to her works: they do
not tell stories nor do they seem to make the political or psychosexual
statements of dada or surrealism. Nor, like Duchamp’s readymades,
do her assemblages seem to be foremost conceptual statements. They
seem, instead, an almost anthropological record of her own obsessive
attentions: a record of immense time and movement devoted to the
manipulation of objects. Her ephemeral materials, designed to be
discarded, often have little inherent value. For example, consider
Sze’s 1998 installation at St. James in London: spilling out of a
shallow closet is a world of household clutter, rather like the closet of
almost any suburban home was upended for us. We see rolls of toilet
paper and boxes of lightbulbs, a feather duster and a ladder, extension
cords and cleaners. At first, all looks jumbled, tossed about. Like most
of Sze’s work however, the density demands a more careful second
look, and at the center we find nascent lyrical lines emerging. There is
a row of carefully balanced razor blades, an arc of upended roofing
nails echoed by the graceful arrangement of single­serving, non­dairy
creamers. What seems to be simply tossed on the floor is actually,
ever so slightly arranged in an arc, tilting toward the vertical stack of
shipping boxes that takes our eyes to the ceiling. The objects
themselves are entirely unremarkable, but the arrangement suggests
the lyricism of movement that is more often imperceptible as we put
objects into closets and take them out, as boxes arrive and then are
thrown away. Here, all those separate moments are presented to us at
once. Indeed, perhaps one way to imagine this is the way the page of
a musical score at a glance spatially arranges invisible rhythms and
harmonies.
To arrive at a better sense of this, consider a detail from Ripe
Fruit Falling, in which we see the coils of the garden hose, the box of
 Fragments 75

lightbulbs that is adorned with a spray of packing material, the

carefully balanced roofing nails, and the sponge. Though at first the
detail seems simply messy, closer meditation reveals the patterns of
attention, the marks of the hand, the records of movement and care.
Perhaps these moments suggest Sze’s optimism about our world of
objects, for surely the graceful arcs and lines of her work are redolent
of deeper harmonies of music or dance, bodies and objects
rhythmically moving through time. The attention, care, and
interactions with objects are evident again in works like Studio, laid
out as a grid instead of an arc.
I would argue that Sze’s work refuses narrative, allegory, or
even the genres of beauty or kitsch that define almost all assemblages
or collections. In Studio we see the ladder, and its structure is
articulated and mirrored by helixes of toothpicks also arranged as
ladders. The ladder and the articulated lamp recur in most of her
works, and these seem the closest things in her work to the
representation of the human body, forcible reminders of how our
bodies articulate and interact with the objects of our endless, serial
consumption. Markers of how bodies move in the ladders, and the
lamp the very face of our attention. In works like Seamless,
suspending her objects from ceilings and walls, the materials remain
the same, but the whole invokes a swirling motion. Plastic strips and
tubes describe the lines of a vortex, the forces lifting leaves, bottles,
bowls, and frames into the air. The lamps look on, illuminating and
emphasizing, an object that gazes as we gaze.
One of Sze’s most stunning works is entitled Proportioned to
the Groove. The inspiration for this work is certainly the perspective
lines of Renaissance painting, and as we enter the work, the grid lines
run far over our head, converging at a vanishing point some fifty feet
away. Suspended in the grid lines are imaginary cities made of balsa
wood frames, the suggestion of vast scope and space, almost the
sketch of what perspective was to represent. But on the floor, we
encounter objects. A stack of books, a pair of jeans, packing materials,
76 Banash

upended nails, spilled sugar, candies, water bottles, bottle caps, and at
intervals, the articulated lamp. The closer to the vanishing point, the
more densely packed these materials. The vanishing point of the grid
thus also maps and structures the attention of the artist, drawing us
relentlessly into the work. Indeed, it is only the wagging finger of a
museum guard that keeps one from crawling farther into the center of
the work, the illuminated centers of care. Yet while the work is
seemingly about space, its title, Proportioned to the Groove, might be
read just as easily as a rhythmic groove. The lines above are about in
space, but the stuff below is arranged in rhythms, describing the
rhythms of things and bodies moving through time.
The remarkable thing about Sze’s later works, and something
that critics always seem to overlook, is that in her more recent
assemblages, all her materials seem to be the kinds of things that
could come off the shelf of a Wal­Mart. The bottle caps and plastic
bowls, the lightbulb boxes and penny nails, the cleaners and the
lamps, and of course the endless candies, sticks of gum, creamers, and
sugars. All the things that flow through our lives only to be disposed
of before we can see what they are, as the organization of our lives
demanded by insistent consumption lulls us into a profound
unawareness of just how our lives are articulated through consumer
goods. The striking newness of bright boxes, the rows of unused
sponges, the pristine hoses; these materials are not marked by use at
all. They seem sterile, without the aura they would acquire in a home.
In this, they mark both the category­killer stores they come from, but
also the sheer volume of these things in our lives. Caught in her
assemblages, they seem unowned, like commodities on store shelves
that long for us to complete them. They still retain what Walter
Benjamin once playfully described as the soul of the commodity,
maintaining “it would be the most empathetic [soul] ever encountered
in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in
whose hand and house it wants to nestle.”43 Indeed, her work
sometimes seems like a window display, and it is hard to approach
 Fragments 77

Sarah Sze, detail from Proportioned to the Groove, 2005. Mixed

media, dimensions variable, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York,
May 12–July 1, 2005. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
78 Banash

any of her assemblages without wanting to reach into it, to choose

from it. In this, I think, more than any other contemporary artist, she
is in touch with the experience of American life in an era of big­box
retail. The newness, the shine of her objects, also puts one in mind,
ironically, of their destiny: “You use it once and throw it away.”
In some of her later works she seems to take this on much
more directly, and though I would still argue not a narrative work,
Things Fall Apart seems an acknowledgment that even the most
seemingly durable consumer goods are engineered with a planned
obsolescence, to pass directly out of our hands. So, Sze has taken a
brand­new Jeep Cherokee and cut it to pieces, hanging its fragments
in a cinematic freeze­frame, a car caught in the disintegration ray of
science fiction. Unlike J. G. Ballard’s bloody, stained, and dented
death machines, the shiny red jeep has not a spot on it.44 It was built
simply to be thrown away. In her emphasis on the new and unused,
Sze underscores the odd imperative to consume rather than to use,
making one think of those fetishized objects of collectors: toys that
were never played with, boxes that were never opened. Sze’s more
recent work is perhaps a closer mirror of shopping than living. Her
assemblages recall our own wandering shopping carts wheeled to the
point of purchase, each its own momentary arrangement. Like the
commodities in her assemblages, we use these carts once, then
destroy the assemblage and consume the objects, only to return again
like Sisyphus, forced to create it again tomorrow, cart after cart in
eternal return.
 Fragments 79

Sarash Sze, Things Fall Apart, 2001 Mixed media, dimensions

variable, “01 01 01 : Art in Technological Times,” San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, March 3–July 8, 2001.
Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
INVENTION: NEWSPAPERS, ADVERTISING, AND THE
ORIGINS OF COLLAGE

The newspaper is the sea; literature flows into it at will.

–Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book: A Spiritual
Instrument,” 1895

If the resplendent posters betrayed their secret,

we would be forever lost to ourselves …
–André Breton, Soluble Fish, 1924

On the morning of January 23rd, 1920, Tristan Tzara brought dada to

Paris. Louis Aragon took the stage at the Palais des Fêtes, read
Tzara’s poem “Le Géant blanc lépreux du paysage” and then made a
surprise announcement: “Zurich Dadaism in the flesh will now
interpret one of his works for you.”1 Tzara walked on stage, picked up
a newspaper, and commenced reading an article while, in the wings,
André Breton and Aragon rang electric bells to drown out his voice.
The mixed crowd of artists, journalists, and civilians, bemused and
slightly bored until that moment, reacted violently. In Memoirs of
Dadaism, Tzara recalls: “This was very badly received by the public,
who became exasperated and shouted: ‘Enough! Enough!’ An attempt
was made to give a futuristic interpretation to this act, but all that I
wanted to convey was simply that my presence on the stage, the sight
82 Banash

of my face and my movements, ought to satisfy people’s curiosity and

that anything I might have said really had no importance.”2
Tzara’s stunt was part of the first of the Literature Fridays
organized by the poets Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, and
Philippe Soupault. These events were conceived very much in the
dada spirit of confrontation and shock pioneered so successfully by
Tzara and others at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich during World War I,
but by 1920 it was becoming more and more difficult to antagonize
audiences. The crowd at this event had sat quite calmly through a
lecture on modern painting by André Salmon, Jean Cocteau reading
the poems of Guillaume Apollinaire, and Max Jacob and Francis
Picabia creating and then erasing a drawing in chalk. Indeed, it was
not until Tzara produced his newspaper that the crowd reacted with
the violence and anger that signifies avant­garde success. Perhaps
Georges Ribemont­Dessaignes captures most vividly what was at
stake in this spectacle: “the resultant indignation of the public which
had come to beg for an artistic pittance, no matter what, as long as it
was art, the effect produced by the presentation of the pictures and
particularly of the manifesto, showed them how useless it was, by
comparison, to have Max Jacob’s poems read by Jean Cocteau.”3
Curiously, the memoirs of the participants and the analyses of later
critics often cite this as a key moment in the development of dada, but
they do so almost exclusively from the point of view of the audience.
Ribemont­Dessaignes maintains that “the crowd is willing to accept
anything in an art which is translated into works. But it does not
tolerate attacks on reasons for living” (110). By reading the
newspaper instead of producing an original work of art or manifesto,
Tzara had pulled the rug out from under the artist and essentially
called into question all of the humanist values associated with artistic
production. Drowning out his voice with those intolerable bells, the
performance is explicitly anti­humanist and certainly anti­lyric. No
doubt the whole spectacle was an assault on the audience, but what of
Tzara himself and the other participants? What did the newspaper
 Invention 83

mean to them? Why would Tzara make his debut in Paris by reading a
newspaper? I believe the answer to this question is, quite simply, that
the newspaper is the ur­form of the historical avant­garde and of
modernism itself.
Benedict Anderson argues that modern nations are always
“imagined communities,” fictions produced more by media than face­
to­face experiences.4 For an individual to link his or her interests to
millions of others that he or she has never met and, indeed, to people
whose interests might well be antithetical to his or her own, requires a
mediating force. The daily newspaper provides just such a link, for
while every reader is isolated and individual, there is the
overwhelming consciousness of mass ritual: “What more vivid figure
for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be
envisioned? At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact
replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop,
or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined
world is visibly rooted in everyday life” (35–6). This powerful
abstract tie serves to bind people into a nation, and it is necessary
because the people of modern nations share so very little: they are not
related by unbreakable kinship ties or geography, nor do they
necessarily share the same religion or see themselves as part of a
sacred cosmological order. However, if the ritual of reading binds
heterogeneous individuals into a cohesive group consciousness, the
paper itself performs a similar kind of black magic for its own
contents, incorporating an anarchic array of stories, notes,
advertisements, and announcements that have no intrinsic connections
with one another into a single totality. For Anderson, this is a product
of the modern conception of time: “The date at the top of the
newspaper, the single most important emblem on it, provides the
essential connection–the steady onward clocking of homogeneous,
empty time. Within that time, ‘the world’ ambles sturdily ahead”
(33).5 The newspaper thus organizes its contents according to a
rational rule of chronology with no deeper principle for essential
84 Banash

relationships or meanings, just as it organizes its readers into a

coherent group who share a daily ritual but perhaps little or nothing
else. Modern, of course, literally means “of the moment,” and the
force of this concept animates the newspaper, making both its
contents and its readers literally modern.
Anderson argues that the modern nation was a product of
reason and capital, negating the role of the sacred and the cult values
of language underpinning theocracies and monarchies. Rather than
the sacred hierarchy, the modern nation depended on ever extendable
but ultimately abstract secular links forged by media like the
newspaper. Just as the nation was thus redefined by reason, capital,
and media, so the work of art became a commodity and lost its
combination of cult value and sacred insight under pressure from the
same forces. Walter Benjamin observes that arts like painting once
functioned mostly as cult objects in religious rituals, and even when
that cult function disappeared, they retained a sacred aura since they
existed as individual, unreproducible works housed in a particular
place. To see them meant a journey of almost religious significance.
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Benjamin observes that “the technique of reproduction detaches the
reproduced object from the domain of tradition … and in permitting
the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular
situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.”6 Serially scattered
throughout the world in books, recordings, or newspapers, works of
art could mean anything and affect people in new ways without the
fetters of received interpretations maintained by institutions. In
essence, mechanical reproduction made all art potentially serial,
ubiquitous, and disposable, much like the newspaper itself. Indeed,
the newspaper itself seems almost pure mechanical reproduction that
liquidates any art whatsoever. While Benjamin seems positively
optimistic in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” in “The Storyteller,” he traces the demise of story as
the liquidation of firsthand experience; his analysis is deeply related
 Invention 85

here as well to aura and opposes the auratic wisdom of the story to the
mechanical information of the modern newspaper.
For Benjamin, story is grounded in oral culture. The good
storyteller provides wisdom about the world, but does so in the
context of lived and local experience. The good story is simple and
immediate, and we understand this in our ability and desire to repeat
it to others. It does not isolate listeners, but draws them into a
concrete communal experience. In essence, Benjamin imagines oral
story traditions as auratic. Like the work of art that can be viewed in
only one place, these exchanges of story take place face­to­face in
communal moments, and thus each is in some way unique. Benjamin
writes: “A man listening to a story is in the company of the
storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship. The
reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other
reader.”7 Even when written down, the spirit of story remains that of
the oral tale, in that it eschews the extensive explanations and
complications characteristic of the novel, such that “among those who
have written down the tales, it is the great ones whose written version
differs least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers” (84).
If the story fosters lived community and wisdom, the newspaper, like
the novel, marks the death of experience overwhelmed by
technologies of information: “Every morning brings us the news of
the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because
no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through
with explanation” (89). The specificity and particularity of the
newspaper story ironically destroys Benjamin’s idea of experience,
since “[t]he value of information does not survive the moment in
which it was new” (89). The newspaper thus presents a continuous
onslaught of information in such detail that it is far beyond the
capacity of any single memory to retain it. Unorganized by wisdom or
insight, unrepeatable, it becomes a ceaseless inhuman flow,
characteristically modern.
86 Banash

In “The Storyteller,” Benjamin seems truly nostalgic for the

simpler and more immediate forms of the story, though he cautions
against this attitude.8 But in spite of this caveat, he suggests that
technology has destroyed experience, overwhelming the human: “For
never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than
strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by
inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience
by those in power” (84). He drives this point home with the poignant
image of a small and frail human body facing the horrors of the
trenches. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” Benjamin formulates this same observation in terms
of aura, remarking that technology itself is the acting subject, taking
up its human objects in an orgy of destruction: “Instead of draining
rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead
of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over
cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way”
(242). Industrialized warfare allows for genocidal destruction between
people who never come face­to­face, just as the newspaper offers an
imaginary community for individuals who will never encounter each
other. Just as no one could fully comprehend, articulate, or overcome
the horrors of mechanized warfare, the limits of the human body are
dwarfed by the unlimited scope and unending flow of the newspaper.
Avant­garde artists including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque,
F. T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, and André Breton all use the newspaper
to define their work as modern.9 The inclusion of this overwhelming
and mass­produced, mechanistic, chaotic, and ephemeral form as a
venue for manifestoes, a raw material for poetry, a subject or material
for painting, marks their art “modern.” It does so as synecdoche, the
newspaper standing in for the liquidation of aura–human scale–in
communities, nations, war, economics, a vast amplification of
information volume and speed. There is something more in it, too. As
Benjamin would have it, the wisdom of story is replaced with the
flow of information, and that observation could well stand for the
 Invention 87

entire phenomena of modernism. In essence, and as I will argue in

what follows, the deep paradigmatic structures of older narrative and
visual forms are dispersed into the endlessly metonymic surfaces of
mechanically reproduced media.

Synthetic Modernism
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque redefined painting in the years just
before World War I. They began by shattering Renaissance
perspective into shimmering fields of conflicting perspectives,
volatizing their subjects. No single point­of­view could truly capture
reality, and so the artist must imagine multiple possibilities in a single
stroke. These faceted canvases were soon invaded by the world itself,
as Braque and then Picasso began to paste in wallpapers and
newspapers. These ready­made fragments played the role of shadows,
lines, and pigments of an image, the profile of a guitar, the contents of
a wine glass, while simultaneously remaining what they are: mass­
produced media, the world not represented, but inserted, into the
picture. In her remarkable book, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism,
Futurism, and the Invention of Collage, Christine Poggi explains just
how the newspaper differs from the other materials Picasso used, and
why they are such a ubiquitous element in his collages. She describes
the newspaper as the ultimate reproducible media, echoing
Benjamin’s insight in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” when she observes that the newspaper “embodies the
principle of reproducibility in utter negation of the unique or
privileged object, for any copy of a newspaper is as good as any
other.”10 The use of newspaper is thus a mark of technological
modernity that undoes the cult value of a picture. The inclusion of the
newspaper punctures the aura of painting, though it doesn’t fully
liquidate it. Yet if a Picasso collage nonetheless remains a unique
work, the newspaper also draws it into the ephemeral world of
consumer culture. As Poggi puts it, the newspaper “challenges the
durability of the work of art, traditionally defined in opposition to the
88 Banash

ephemeral products of mass culture. It redefines the creative act as a

manipulation of iterable, arbitrary signs, like those of writing. And it
also thereby implicitly points to the conventionality of seemingly
original, spontaneous signs for the revelation of the self; such as
sketch like brush strokes or heightened color” (153).
While Picasso and Braque revolutionized pictorial
representation, they could hardly have chosen more ordinary subjects.
While other artists marked their modernity with the invocation of
motorcars and airplanes, cubist subjects almost always remain
focused on the ordinary world of everyday life: the café table, the
wine glass, the pipe, the newspaper, domestic interiors, music, or
portraits of friends. Yet these subjects are only seemingly
conservative, serving to mask a deeper insight. The speed and
complexity of the world did increase because of modern technologies,
but the immediate impact was not that suddenly one raced across the
continent in a car or flew in planes. Instead, the fact that others now
did such things changed the size of the world and our perception of it.
One might never leave the café table, but the table now looked
different. The play of perspectives in cubist portraits literalize the
insights of philosophy (Henri Bergson) and science (relativity),
suggesting that every object exists only in perspective. Shattering the
single point­of­view, the paintings show sliding, shifting possibilities
from which to grasp the subject, none complete in itself. The effect is
also to overwrite the illusions of depth, so important to the illusion of
painting, as a window into reality. The cubist world has some depths,
but these move and shift in profound relativity: the same mass can be
read as transparent or opaque, for instance, depending on how one
enters the picture. To view a cubist painting is not to be drawn in, but
for the eye to skim the surface. Suddenly the world looks far flatter. It
is just this jittery, sliding eye that also defines the world of the
newspaper, as it reports more of the world from less coherent
perspectives. The newspapers depicted in cubist paintings and the
 Invention 89

fragments of newspaper glued to the surface of the canvas both mark

the media that is closest to the cubist sense: a volatile world.
In The Picasso Papers, Rosalind Krauss points out that just as
analytic cubism presented multiple perspectives of a single object
simultaneously, the newspaper collages of synthetic cubism present a
dialogic mass of voices at once without resolving them. Krauss drives
this point home with a careful reminder of Bakhtin’s obsession with
Dostoevsky–and that modern master’s obsession with the newspaper:

While Bakhtin has no interest in Dostoevsky’s biography as an explanatory

fulcrum for his analysis, this journalistic practice, which requires that
everything be treated in the context of the present and that issues of
causality be constantly suspended, is not unconnected to Dostoevsky’s
invention: “his love of the newspaper, his deep and subtle understanding of
the newspaper page as a living reflection of the contradictions of
contemporary society in the cross­section of a single day, where the most
diverse and contradictory material is laid out, extensively, side by side and
one side against the other,” is not an explanation for Dostoevsky’s artistic
vision, but rather itself explained by that vision.11

This suggests exactly why the form of the newspaper is opposed to

those older practices of fine art painting or lyric poetry. In these
genres, the role of the artist is to create and control an absolute
subjectivity ordering the chaos of the self and the world. However, in
the slippery surfaces of modernism, so aptly captured in the chaotic
chance of the newspaper sheet, no such single point­of­view is to be
found. This insight is most clearly expressed in Marshall McLuhan’s
analysis of the differences between the book and the newspaper in
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. According to
McLuhan, the press is unlike the book precisely because it does away
with the single author’s point­of­view in favor of a riotous mosaic of
voices with which the reader must participate: “Up to this point we
have discussed the press as a mosaic successor to the book­form. The
90 Banash

mosaic is the mode of the corporate or collective image and

commands deep participation. This participation is communal rather
than private, inclusive rather than exclusive.”12 McLuhan could just as
easily be describing the cubist canvas that demands we skate across
its flat surfaces with far deeper and more active participation than
more unified forms could possibly support. He continues to see the
newspaper as a vast plane of imaginary possible connections so
clearly formulated by Benedict Anderson: “But the press is a daily
action and fiction or thing made, and it is made out of just about
everything in the community. By the mosaic means, it is made into a
communal image or cross­section” (189).
Like Tristan Tzara, Picasso then too presents himself as that
most modern subject, the reader of newspapers. Let us go back and
take Tzara at his word when he says that he wanted his gestures, his
actions, to convey his message. Essentially, he stands on stage and
tells us that in the midst of the deafening, mechanical cacophony of
everyday life, “the artist reads the newspaper.” This becomes more
plausible when we remember that the press was the only established
mass medium at the time, and the papers of the early twentieth
century were a good deal different than the papers we know today.
Though radio was coming and film was already gaining the high
ground, it was the newspaper and its cousin, the illustrated advertising
poster, which had changed the face of cities at the end of the
nineteenth century and still defined the first decades of the twentieth.
Newspapers were both a good deal more diverse, numerous, and
important than they are today, carrying items both political and
sensational, but also serialized novels, crime reporting, gossip,
manifestoes, editorials, announcements, and, of course,
advertisements. The avant­garde itself communicated with its public
through the newspaper, where they placed announcements for their
spectacles, and they depended on the publicity of the reviews they
received from journalists to keep the energy of the scandal active long
after the events and exhibitions themselves had ended. Indeed, it is
 Invention 91

difficult to imagine dada without the publicity of newspapers, and it

comes as no surprise to learn that Tristan Tzara for years employed
clipping services to send him every mention of dada to be found in
the world press.
The ubiquity of the newspaper as a mass medium was made
possible largely through technological improvements in printing and
fundamental changes in the financing of papers. Prior to 1860,
newspapers were printed one sheet at a time, and this time­consuming
process forced most papers to publish only once a week.
Subscriptions to these papers remained the primary source of revenue,
and this made them expensive, putting a daily paper out of the reach
of most ordinary citizens, who would instead share papers at cafés.
With the development of rotary presses that could print on continuous
sheets of paper, along with the cultivation of extensive advertising
revenues as a primary source of income, the paper could become a
ubiquitous and affordable medium literally blanketing cities.
Entrepreneurial publishers like Moïse Millaud in France quickly
realized the greater potential of the daily newspaper, and the changes
that such production would entail not only for production and
distribution, but for content as well. According to René de Livois, by
the 1860s, French newspapers were on the cusp of creating the first
real wall­to­wall mediascape in Paris:

It was obvious that the public asked only to be served, and that there was a
large market to satisfy. The newspapers couldn’t go after these customers
unless the price was reasonable and they could address everyone instead of
limiting themselves to educated, if not erudite, readers. To reach this goal,
the entrepreneurs of the press substituted the “quantity press” for the
“quality press.” To augment circulation, they lowered the price for
subscriptions and the price for individual issues which made the newspaper
competitive in every market. Simply, it is necessaryonly to have access to a
well­developed and organized distribution network that extends its reach to
even the smallest places. Girardin [publisher for La Presse] attempted to
92 Banash

apply this concept, but was unable to fully realize it. For him, it was out of
the question that a newspaper could dispense with quality literary and
political contributions and devote itself completely to popular subjects and
sensational items. Millaud would be the one to take that step.13

De Livois’s account underscores the attitude to the new popular press

as a threat to literature, truth, and social control, and we should note
with interest that the fact of a lower price becomes a metaphor for a
lower standard of content in his account. Daily publication coupled
with the affordable price and efficient distribution created the
possibility for a mass audience, and with it, the perceived debasement
of quality that attends the introduction of any mass medium. Rather
than offer a consistent and reasoned political point of view, or attempt
to present serious literature, Millaud’s Le Petit Journal would cater to
any sensationalism, and with its innovative rotary presses cranking
out a continuous catalog of hype and scandal, would achieve sales of
close to half a million papers some days with serial novels like Les
thugs etrangleurs and sensational crime reporting (276). Though
Millaud was perhaps the most innovative, he was hardly alone. “In
1860, there were 500 publications in Paris, and almost another 1000
in the rest of France. The press conquered the public. Reading
newspapers became a real need, but it was not interest in politics that
created this infatuation” (272). Rather, it was the sensational pleasures
of advertising hype and scandal that were the driving force of
newspapers.
The sheer number of newspapers published in Paris, New
York, and other major cities by the end of the nineteenth century is
astonishing. Along with advertising posters, which depended on
similar technological developments, the façades of anything from
newspaper kiosks to entire commercial buildings were transformed
into anarchic riots of competing texts. Indeed, the macrocosm of these
shocking urban façades is perfectly mirrored in the microcosm of
advertising pages at the back of every newspaper and illustrated
 Invention 93

Buildings that look like the back pages of newspapers—Place du

Delta, Paris, France, in an early twentieth­century postcard.
94 Banash

A page of advertising from Le Figaro Illustré, 1910.

 Invention 95

journal. It is in these façades and newspaper pages that the dialectic of

the commodity form is most brutally evident in the new mass medium
of print. On the back pages of any newspaper or illustrated journal,
advertisements for any conceivable product or service make their
appearance with no formal order. The grossest metonymies and
parataxis reign. It is in these pages that one would be not at all
surprised to find that most proverbial collection of objects: the
umbrella, the sewing machine, and the dissecting table. However,
while this profusion of commodities presents the reader with an
intoxicating catalog of material plenitude and excess in every form, it
is all caught in the deadening sameness of the commodity form itself.
If every object cries out to the reader, each is also yet another example
of a mass­produced sameness that constitutes the rise of modern
everyday life, expanded but flattened. While the rule of chance and
excess is so clearly visible in these advertising texts, there is a similar
dialectic at work in the columns of type that constitute the rest of the
paper. Here, too, there is a profusion of difference: serial fictions
jostle with actual news; sensational crime stories with sentimental
novels; gossip and editorials with paid announcements and avant­
garde manifestoes. However, despite the vast differences in this
bewildering profusion of genres, all of it is presented in the relentless
march of invariable columns. The sameness of the newspaper layout
(like the flatness of the cubist canvas) liquidates, at the level of form,
the differences so evident in the varied genres of the contents.
The contradictions and excesses of this form, its shameless
commercial purpose, and its utter ubiquity were met with little
enthusiasm by the romantic and symbolist artists and critics of the
nineteenth century, already so threatened by the relentless march of
capital. Perhaps Charles Augustin Sainte­Beuve offered the first and
most famous of these attacks in his essay, “Industrial Literature.”
Noting that papers would often carry advertisements or
announcements for books their own reviewers panned, he was left to
exclaim, “How can you condemn something you are two inches away
96 Banash

from? How can you call detestable and baleful something proclaimed
and paraded two inches further down as the wonder of the age?”14
Sainte­Beuve’s protest highlights the irrationality inherent in
newspapers. However, it would be left to the symbolist poet Stéphane
Mallarmé to write the most frequently cited critique of the newspaper
in his essay, “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument.” Published in 1895, it
is remarkable how Mallarmé anticipates our own contemporary
obsession with surfaces and depths, so important to the critique of
modernist visual art and postmodernist literature alike. Put in the
simplest terms, Mallarmé objects to the flatness of the newspaper:
“Every discovery made by printers has hitherto been absorbed in the
most elementary fashion by the newspaper, and can be summed up in
the word: Press. The result has been simply a plain sheet of paper
upon which a flow of words is printed in the most unrefined
manner.”15 Opposed to “the newspaper with its full sheet on display,”
Mallarmé celebrates the mysterious depths of the book: “Yes, were it
not for the folding of the paper and the depths thereby established,
that darkness scattered about in the form of black characters could not
rise and issue forth in gleams of mystery from the page to which we
are about to turn” (82). Instead of the book’s mysterious depths in
which any “motif has been properly placed at a certain height on the
page, according to its own or to the book’s distribution of light,” the
newspaper “inflicts the monotonousness of its eternally unbearable
columns, which are merely strung down the pages by hundreds”
(82–3).
Mallarmé’s brilliant analysis takes the criticism Saint­Bueve
and others were directing at the content of newspapers and
rearticulates it explicitly at the level of form. Essentially, Mallarmé is
horrified at the random juxtapositions created by the dense and
relentless columns of newsprint and their attendant advertisements.
Here, the form has effaced the hand of the artist, making meaning
dependent on chances dictated by nothing other than haste and cost
efficiency. Worse yet, the newspaper destroys the intimate experience
 Invention 97

of reading, making its riot of words immediately available for anyone.

Implicitly in his metaphors, the virginal book is opposed to the paper
whore. For Mallarmé, the quest of the artist for “a hymn, all harmony
and joy; an immaculate grouping of universal relationships come
together for miraculous and glittering occasion” (80) could only be
realized in the depths of the book’s folds. Mallarmé’s nineteenth­
century symbolist analysis of flatness meshes in surprising and
interesting ways with modernist and postmodernist accounts of this
formal property in the work of Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss,
and Fredric Jameson.
In his seminal essay from 1939, “Avant­Garde and Kitsch,”
Clement Greenberg explains and defends the very distinctions
between serious art and popular mass­produced entertainment that
animated the nineteenth­century reception of the newspaper as a mass
medium. Greenberg defines kitsch as “popular, commercial art and
literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads,
slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing,
Hollywood movies, etc., etc.”16 As Greenberg’s list suggests, almost
every mass­reproduced kind of art falls into this category. “Kitsch is a
product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of
Western Europe and America and established what is called universal
literacy” (9). One can hear the sarcasm directed at both the rise of
functional literacy and something of the horror at the tastes such mass
literacy produced. Like Sainte­Beuve, Mallarmé, and other critics of
mass culture, there is a terrible paranoia about kitsch as a dangerous
and counterfeit article: “Traps are laid even in those areas, so to
speak, that are the preserves of genuine culture. It is not enough today,
in a country like ours, to have an inclination towards the latter, one
must have a true passion for it that will give him the power to resist
the faked article that surrounds and presses in on him from the
moment he is old enough to look at the funny papers” (11). For
Greenberg, “press” is certainly a part of the problem, and it shouldn’t
surprise us that we find once again the corruption beginning in the
98 Banash

sensational pages of newspapers. Like nineteenth­century critics,

what all such forms of mass reproduction and industrial art threaten is
authenticity and its attendant quality, autonomy. Since almost all
culture is now produced and mediated in mass­reproduced forms,
Greenberg falls back on symbolist solipsism and hermeticism at the
level of form to distinguish an authentic mode for modern art: “It has
been in search of the absolute that the avant­garde has arrived at
‘abstract’ or ‘nonobjective’ art–and poetry, too. The avant­garde poet
or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid
solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a
landscape–not its picture–is aesthetically valid; something given,
increate, independent of meanings, similars, or originals. Content is to
be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature
cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself” (5–6).
The “avant­garde” Greenberg celebrates here is not what we now
think of as the historical avant­garde: futurism, dadaism, surrealism.
For Greenberg, these movements were all corrupt and reactionary
forms of kitsch; only the abstraction embodied in the work of the
cubists and abstract expressionists, or the symbolist and high
modernist poets and novelists, could be considered “authentic” art.
Thus, just as the great theme of the modernist novel was the process
of writing novels, so abstract painting became pure to the extent that
it became a meditation on its own most obvious formal property. In
his essay “Modernist Painting,” Greenberg puts it dogmatically by
maintaining that “flatness alone was unique and exclusive to that art
... [it] was the only condition painting shared with no other art.”17
There is a complex irony here, however, for Greenberg’s celebration
of pictorial flatness is simultaneously a quest for the hermeneutic
depths denied in kitsch forms: “But the ultimate values which the
cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at second
remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left
by the plastic values. It is only then that the recognizable, the
miraculous and the sympathetic enter” (15). This dizzying play of
 Invention 99

surfaces and depths recalls Mallarmé’s analysis of the newspaper. His

objection was twofold: first, that its flatness made it accessible to
everyone; second, that its inflexible form in columns negated the
intention of the artist. Yet in a different medium, Greenberg praises
the flat surfaces of abstract painting precisely because they keep out
the uninitiated and guarantee the pure intentionality of the artist.
Animating both the condemnation and celebration of flatness is the
obsession with interpretive depths and the fear that they are
disappearing in the maw of mechanical reproduction. In essence,
Greenberg redeems the riot of materials and perspectives in cubist
paintings by stressing a need for sophisticated interpretive strategies
that would provide the one, real meaning of the apparent mess. He
seeks a kind of paradigmatic metaphor in the surface of the canvas
that totalizes anything that might appear on it. Yet one could just as
easily suggest that the transformations of the world undercut any such
metaphoric totalization with an infinite series of metonymic
connections, and these are found in cubist canvases, advertisements,
and newspapers alike, themselves all metonyms for one another.
Essentially, flatness is the lynchpin of almost all Fredric
Jameson’s arguments in his magisterial Postmodernism, or, the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in which he defines our own era
with “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new
kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme
formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we will have
occasion to return in a number of other contexts.”18 Jameson’s insight
shows the continuity in critical obsession with the formal trait of
flatness as both a literal fact of media from painting to printing, and
even, somewhat counterintuitively, disciplines from contemporary
architecture to philosophy. Jameson, in some ways closer to Mallarmé
than Greenberg, equates the flatness of everything from the pastiche
of literary style to the façade of the Wells Fargo building, “a surface
which seems to be unsupported by any volume” (13). The loss of
those deep volumes in disparate media and genres like music, poetry,
100 Banash

and television is the formal expression of a change in our sense of the

human, and Jameson labels this loss “the waning of affect”:

The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of
the psychopathologies of that ego–what I have been calling the waning of
affect. But it means the end of much more–the end, for example, of style,
in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive
individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of
mechanical reproduction). As for expression and feelings or emotions, the
liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered
subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation
from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self
present to do the feeling. (15)

It is precisely such depth–and the personal style that expresses it in

works of art–that Tristan Tzara repudiated with his face hidden behind
the columns of a newspaper: his unique and strongly accented voice
drowned out by ringing bells. Further, it is this very depth that
Mallarmé celebrates in the experience of reading books: “Thus, in
reading, a lonely, quiet concert is given for our minds, and they in
turn, less noisily, reach its meaning” (83). For Jameson, however, the
loss of hermeneutic depth is a problem, for it leaves contemporary
subjects, both artists and audience, little to do but to slip and slide
from one surface to the next, unable, quite literally, to locate
themselves in relationship to a larger world. To explain this, he turns
to emphatically concrete geography in the form of Kevin Lynch’s
seminal work, The Image of the City: “Kevin Lynch taught us that the
alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map
(in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in
which they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in
which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural
boundaries, built perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious
examples” (51). Lynch’s narrative of lost citizens trapped in the mass­
 Invention 101

produced grid of urban development analogically reproduces Clement

Greenberg’s analysis of form and painting, but shows us that even
landscapes are now alienated. For Greenberg, the ultimate example of
authentic art is landscape itself, with its unique existence in space and
time, its being as “something given, increate, independent of
meanings, similars, originals” (6). However, in the face of even
architectural mass production, urban landscapes have been reduced in
many cases to just the sort of mass­produced sameness that makes
them perfectly anonymous and fungible. As Gertrude Stein said of
Oakland, “There is no there there.”19 All of this, of course, recalls
Walter Benjamin’s formulation of aura as the work of art’s “presence
in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens
to be” (220). For Benjamin, it was precisely the technologies of mass
reproduction that destroyed such aura, as the mass­produced grids of
modern cities obliterate the unique in landscape, and this is just one
aspect of Jameson’s depthlessness which makes it so hard for the
subject to locate itself. More suggestive yet is Lynch’s insistence on
the grid as a particularly troublesome form, especially given its
importance to the production of newspapers, the layout of cities, and
the themes of modernist painting and other arts.
Rosalind Krauss explains the attraction of grids for modernist
painters and the connection of this claustrophobic form to the
problems of landscape and narrative. Within its austere bars, we hear
“no scream of birds across open skies, no rush of distant water–for the
grid has collapsed the spatiality of nature onto the bounded surface of
a purely cultural object.”20 Not only does the grid thematize the
medium of the canvas, it impedes narrative, exchanging development
for pure, mechanical repetition. As Krauss puts it, “the absolute stasis
of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of center, of inflection, emphasizes
not only its anti­referential character, but–more importantly–its
hostility to narrative” (158). Those artists who devoted themselves to
it, like Mondrian, essentially stopped developing, turning their careers
to emphatic repetition. Though not as austere as the grid of modernist
102 Banash

painting or the façades of the International style, the newspaper page,

too, is essentially a flat grid, and it is in part the ways in which this
form manhandles the diverse content that flows into it that horrified
Mallarmé with its both inflexible and chance arrangements. The
newspaper’s grid constitutes an eternal return of the same,
challenging the autonomy and identity of both authors and audiences,
yet calling out to everyone as an imagined framework of community.
However, much like Lynch’s urban grid, the flat, regimented forms of
the newspaper were blanketing cities all over the world, and this too
returns us to the play of surfaces and depths.
Throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century, one
could find journaux crevés postcards representing individual
newspapers. On each, the full, unfolded front page of the paper with
its leader was prominently displayed. In each of these postcards, the
newspaper is torn and ripped, its page in tatters, through which one
can see a photograph of an engraving representing a particular person,
figure, or issue connected with the paper. Read uncritically, this is
simply a “dramatic” visual narrative of what we might find “within”
the paper. However, given the obsession with the newspaper’s flat and
open form, it is difficult not to read against the grain here and note
that the newspaper’s columns of dense print serve to cover the
photograph, its surface working more to keep us out of the plays of
perspectives arrayed in depthless, relentless columns that cover over
the unified and deep perspectival image. Within this visual metaphor,
it is necessary to rend the paper and fight one’s way out of its grid in
order to reach the real, hidden away at some depth behind it. Indeed,
one can hardly look at these postcards and not think of Borges’s
parable in which the map becomes the territory–in this case of
modern life itself. Just as to be modern is to be of the moment, and
the newspaper is quite literally the most modern form of all, perhaps
we should not be so surprised that Tzara not only presented himself to
the Paris avant­garde thus as the most modern figure imaginable, the
 Invention 103

Journaux crevés advertising postcard for publisher Henri Rochefort’s

paper, L’Intransigeant, 1902.
104 Banash

reader of newspapers, his most famous poem would be a formula to

read and rend the newspaper.
In early manifestoes by both Breton and Tzara, the newspaper
has a privileged place not merely as an image, but also as a source of
avant­garde practice. It is in these early invocations of the newspaper
that we can first see just how important the form is to the avant­
garde’s sense of itself and its practice. In “Dada Manifesto 1918,”
Tristan Tzara exclaims: “Every product of disgust capable of
becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of
its whole being engaged in destructive action.”21 To become the
irrational, transformative, semiotic criminals the manifesto calls for,
dada artists employed both visual and verbal collage forms. Offering a
critique of both the depths of lyric subjectivity and the poses of
journalistic objectivity, Tzara offers the following recipe for collage
poems:

To make a dadaist poem

Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a
bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left
the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a
sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the
vulgar. (92)
 Invention 105

This recipe underscores the critical potentials of collage as a method

for severing connections of logic and sense, naturalizing repressive
and conservative forces. Brilliantly, Tzara brings together both the
standardization of modernity associated with mass production in the
form of the daily newspaper and the inadequacy of traditional lyric
poetry or other art to protest such forces. Thus Tzara’s transgression is
less a critique of the newspaper itself than of the older, romantic
conception of the artist as an oppositional figure standing outside of
culture with a God’s­eye view from which to offer the truth of a
transcendent self or nature. Directing the would­be dada poet to “copy
conscientiously,” Tzara puts the artist at the mercy of chance and the
cuts made from the paper. Yet, if we remember Mallarmé’s objection
to the paper as a form of chance, Tzara is simply taking the logic of
the form to its furthest extreme. Essentially, the project is one of
emptying out hermeneutic depths, leaving neither the poet nor the
newspaper a claim for truth. Instead, there is only the chance
arrangement of words. This recipe might well be Tzara’s most famous
work of art itself, and once again we see Tzara almost in the guise
from 1920, the most modern reader of the newspaper.
Though opposed to the kind of depthless and nihilistic chance
celebrated by dada, André Breton and the surrealists too would turn to
the newspaper as the source for forms of avant­garde practice. In the
first Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton offers a revision of Tzara’s
recipe: “Surrealist methods would, moreover, demand to be heard.
Everything is valid when it comes to obtaining the desired suddenness
from certain associations. The pieces of paper that Picasso and Braque
insert into their work have the same value as the introduction of a
platitude into a literary analysis of the most rigorous sort. It is even
permissible to entitle POEM [emphasis in original] what we get from
the most random assemblage possible (observe, if you will, the
syntax) of headlines and scraps of headlines cut out of the
newspapers.”22 The differences between the surrealists and the
dadaists are striking. Where Tzara cuts all the semantic connections
106 Banash

between individual words, leaving almost everything to chance,

Breton insists on keeping at least fragments of headlines, complete
syntactical units. Instead of joyous nonsense, Breton seeks the
illumination of new orders through these strange images.
Interestingly, both Tzara and Breton provide examples of the kinds of
poetry their recipes produce. Tzara’s does not observe syntax,
“spectator all to efforts from the it is no longer 10 to 12” (92) reads
one line. Breton’s method yields something much more lyrical, “A
burst of laughter / of sapphire in the island of Ceylon” (41).23 Though
more lyrical than dadaism, this approach to poetry is still a profound
and powerful challenge to traditional conceptions of the artist. Like
Tzara, Breton works with ready­made words, and chance still plays a
profound role. Yet, for all their differences, the fact that both artists
turn to the newspaper underscores the influence of the form.
By 1924, André Breton and Tristan Tzara had fallen out.
Breton was done with dada anarchy, and he wanted to let everyone
know that the time had come for something different. With the
publication of the “Manifesto of Surrealism,” he put the avant­garde
firmly on a positive program of emphatic and quasi­scientific
investigation: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states,
dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind
of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak” (14). Written at
the same time as this first manifesto, Breton’s, Soluble Fish put its
plan into practice.
Automatic writing was a key technique of the early
surrealists, enabling, they believed, access to that absolute reality
between the dream and the real. Breton describes the technique in the
first manifesto in exquisite detail, emphasizing the morbidly passive
state it demands. Commanding the would­be automatic author to find
a comfortable place, he suggests to “have writing materials brought to
you,” (29) for apparently the activity of finding them oneself might be
too much. Then, stipulating that one forgets about one’s talents,
genius, and “everyone else,” Breton commands one to “[w]rite
 Invention 107

quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you

will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what
you have written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so
compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a
sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be
heard” (29–30). In just this manner, Breton produced Soluble Fish,
one of his most difficult and strange works.24 Unlike Nadja and Mad
Love, which read alternately as novels, memoirs, or psychoanalytic
case histories, Soluble Fish actually performs the irrational world of
the dream instead of narrating it. Like these other works, scenes of
Paris street life are juxtaposed with fantastic castles and Breton’s
obsessions with stones, stars, diamonds, crystals, mirrors, and water.
But these more elemental images are interwoven with dream
sequences unfolding through shop windows and billboards,
streetlights and factories. In addition, the newspaper plays a
prominent role, with an entire chapter playing out Mallarmé’s worst
fears about this strange form. In the following section of Soluble Fish,
Breton skitters across the surface of a newspaper: “The ground
beneath my feet is nothing but an enormous unfolded newspaper.
Sometimes a photograph comes by; it is a nondescript curiosity, and
from the flowers there uniformly rises the smell, the good smell, of
printer’s ink.” Breton continues across the surface of the paper,
encountering ship movements, place names, and even the folds of the
paper itself. He encounters advertisements, “I go on to read a few
advertisements, well­written ones, in which contradiction plays a
lively role; it really served as a hand­blotter in this advertising
agency.” The newspaper becomes a place, though its skyline is purely
commercial: “There is also a remarkable view of the sky, in the very
same style as business letterheads showing a factory with all its
chimneys smoking.” The journey over the surface of the newspaper
finally culminates in the invocation of the mechanical: “I have only to
close my eyes if I do not wish to bestow my attention, which is
108 Banash

mechanical and therefore most unfavorable, on the Great Awakening

of the Universe.”25
These are remarkable images indeed, and they suggest how
the newspaper transformed the experience of avant­garde artists, who
were defining themselves in relation to media culture rather than
nature. Breton demonstrates that the natural world has been covered
over or exchanged for the newspaper form. Unlike the book, which
invites us into its dark and mysterious folds, the newspaper unfolds,
covering over the world around us. The entire natural world, from the
sky above to the flowers below, has been covered with a newspaper
through which we now walk. This is a complex exchange, in which
the natural landscape that once inspired poets is exchanged for a
mediascape that displaces and reproduces all those older features as a
purely cultural construction. If art was once defined as holding the
mirror up to nature, Breton projects us into a world in which there are
only mirrors, for the newspaper obscures anything it might
supposedly reflect, filling all available space–even wrapping itself
around a forest he only suspects might be underneath the paper: “At
the bottom of the fourth page the newspaper has an unusual fold that I
can describe as follows: it looks as if it has been wrapped around a
metallic object, judging by a rusty spot that might be a forest” (60).
Whatever depths there may be in this strange landscape, they are
inaccessible behind the surface of the paper itself. Perhaps the
newspaper conceals a weapon or a bed behind its unbroken sheet, but
Breton cannot move beyond it to find out. Instead, he travels over and
through the paper as it seems to travel and move around him, with its
floating photographs. In this landscape, the light which illuminates
the larger headline fonts is “celebrated by poets,” (60) perhaps
referencing the importance of headlines and newspaper fonts to both
avant­garde poetry and painting. Significantly, politics is a minor part
of the newspaper, which Breton stumbles upon late, though with the
sinister comment that these “calcium men,” (61) presumably
skeletons, are wielding much of the power. More important to Breton
 Invention 109

are the images of the advertisements and the commercial metaphors,

the news of fashion and the magic of this new mediascape suffused
with “the good smell” of printer’s ink (60). The final paragraph is
ambiguous, suggesting, but hardly affirming, the possibility of
moving beyond the newspaper landscape, with its “mechanical
attention” (61). After all, since the newspaper is itself mobile and
concerned with travel, might it not simply sweep its flaneur along
with it? The beginning of the next section would suggest that if the
newspaper has not filled the world completely, media covers more
and more of it, for Breton leaps not off the newspaper and into nature,
but seems to slide from the surface of the newspaper to the surface of
an ad as a way to extricate himself from this ubiquitous newspaper:
“if the resplendent posters betrayed their secret,” the next section
begins, “we would be forever lost to ourselves” (61).
In works such as Soluble Fish, surrealists hoped to
revolutionize the world. The dreamworld of plenitude and chance
represented in newspapers and advertising promised an existence of
freedom and excitement, chance and self­invention. Of course, such
dream images repressed the brutal conformity of work and the
regimented sameness of everyday life that subtend this emerging
consumer culture. In essence, one might say that the surrealists
demanded that everyday life pay off these promises of freedom and
self­invention found in the media dreamworld. In part, those promises
are encoded into the very form of the paper, with its radical
juxtapositions and chance encounters that cut against whatever
editorial viewpoint or commercial agenda might animate a given
example. The riot of chance connections and possibilities, even the
palpably false promises of advertising, might be recombined to form a
critical, utopian statement, revealing and actualizing the desire for a
vastly different world–a surreality.
Throughout the twentieth century, artists would return to the
newspaper, rediscovering and reinventing its attractions and
potentials. While Picasso, Tzara, and Breton defined the major
110 Banash

approaches of modern artists to the newspaper, Brion Gysin and

William Burroughs would reinvent newspaper collage for a
postmodern age. Indeed, Burroughs would go on to create the “cut­
up” trilogy, but the formal innovation and rediscovery of collage
emerged through the work of Brion Gysin, whose reinvention of
collage even carries the date, September of 1959. During that fall,
Brion Gysin was alone in his room at 9 rue Git­le­Coeur, the “Beat
Hotel” in Paris, working on his drawings, when he discovered a
technique for collage that would transform postmodern literature:

While cutting a mount for a drawing in room #15, I sliced through a pile of
newspapers with my Stanley blade and thought of what I had said to
Burroughs some six months earlier about the necessity for turning painters’
techniques directly into writing. I picked up the raw words and began to
piece together texts that later appeared as “First Cut­Ups” in “Minutes to
Go.” At the time I thought them hilariously funny and hysterically
meaningful. I laughed so hard my neighbors thought I’d flipped. I hope you
may discover this unusual pleasure for yourselves–this short­lived but
unique intoxication. Cut up this page you are reading and see what happens.
See what I say as well as hear it.26

Gysin’s account, frequently retold by everyone from Allen Ginsberg

to Genesis P­Orridge, has become a kind of myth about the origins of
postmodernism itself. Encoded in it are both its direct connection to
the techniques of the historical avant­garde as well as suggestions of
the new directions that collage would take in postmodern literature.
Gysin’s technique is animated by both the destructive impulse of dada
and the search for alternative images and possibilities associated with
the projects of surrealism. However, Gysin and others would also find
new materials, practices, and metaphors to reinvent the techniques of
collage for a changing world. Gysin would see words as literal objects
to be manipulated, like paint on canvas, but because he worked with
broad strips of newspaper, his collages would be far more narrative
 Invention 111

than any modernist collage. Gysin would also see collage as a tool,
like drugs, for the expansion of consciousness, and this too would
give collage both a critical and constructive power beyond anything
modernist collage artists had ever claimed for the technique. Finally,
Gysin would connect collage to the traditions of magic, seeing in it
the possibility to cast spells that would create and destroy
proliferating worlds.
In Gysin’s description of his discovery, the materiality of the
collage process is emphasized. Gysin, first and foremost a painter,
sees the words he is working with as images in their own right, so
much raw material that must be seen as well as heard. In fact, Gysin
saw the cut­up technique as part of a constellation of techniques
including calligraphic painting and permutation poetry that were all as
much visual as literary arts: “Word symbols turn back into visual
symbols” (46). In an unpublished interview, Gysin would make this
even more explicit: “We began to find out a whole lot of things about
the real nature of words and writing. What are words and what are
they doing? The cut­up method treats words as the painter treats his
paint, raw material with rules and reasons of its own … there’s an
actual treatment of the material as if it were a piece of cloth. The
sentence, even, the word, becomes a real piece of plastic material that
you can cut into.”27 This was not an isolated approach, as late in his
life Gysin reiterated the point in almost the same terms: “cut­ups are
taking the actual matter of writing as if it were the same as the matter
in sculpting or in painting ... and handling it with a plastic manner”
(54). For Gysin, words are treated as if they are pure material, rather
than symbolic abstractions. Gysin’s insistence on the material
existence of words stresses their construction. In The Visible Word,
Johanna Drucker notes that literary texts are traditionally presented as
unmarked, using a uniform “wall of type” that creates the illusion of a
voice speaking.28 By stressing the materiality of the word, Gysin
emphasizes the materiality of the word as itself, all but erasing that
illusion of a voice speaking.
112 Banash

This emphasis on the materiality of the word is echoed in

Gysin’s comparison of the cut­up technique to hashish intoxication, in
which the cut­up words inspire an utterly somatic experience of literal
intoxication–an experience so intense he speculates that those in
neighboring rooms would think that he had flipped. In a later
interview, Gysin is even more direct: “It was quite exhilarating, like
pot, you know” (qtd. in Miles 195). This description of intoxication is
an important sign of how postmodern cut­ups differ from modernist
collages. Tzara and Breton were first and foremost interested in
transforming an objective world of representation. In part, Gysin
shares this desire with the historical avant­garde, though he articulates
it in particularly postmodern, Burroughsian terms: “The Biological
Film, now showing on Earth, can and must be rewritten. It is a lousy
movie to be withdrawn Now from the dimensional screen and sent
back to Rewrite” (46). For Gysin, experience is constructed at every
level through the processes of representation. To find alternative
possibilities, Gysin insists that these scripts must be rewritten, and
this would be first and foremost the practice of critiquing and
transforming identity: “Science is near enough ready to tell me who
he [Gysin] is for me to be much less interested than formerly in him. I
could not care less about his so­called talent or lack of it. Brion Gysin
is a drag. I am not interested” (46). Gysin was far less interested in
building a profitable, spectacular image of himself as an artist than in
escaping identity altogether. Both his relative obscurity and financial
straits he found himself in at the end of his life testify to his success,
as well as the price he paid for it. Gysin used collage as a tool to carry
out a micro­political deconstruction of his identity. This project of
personal reinvention would at times render him all but imperceptible.
The first cut­up experiments that began at the Beat Hotel in
1959 would culminate in the publication of Minutes to Go in 1960.
This collaborative work was constructed by Gysin and Burroughs, as
well as Gregory Corso and Sinclair Beiles, and contained forty cut­
ups. The book begins with a sort of preamble by Gysin, constructed of
 Invention 113

cut­up material. The marginal perspective and resistant posture

associated with the technique is immediately evident:

the hallucinated have come to tell you that yr utilities

are being shut off dreams monitored thought directed
sex is shutting down everywhere you are being sent
all words are taped agents everywhere
marking down the live ones to exterminate29

After laying bare the dire situation of living in a completely scripted

world, the poem suggests that the book itself is a guide to active
resistance:

Here and now we will show you what you can do

with and to
the words
...
slice down the middle dice into sections (4)

There is a major difference between these collages and most of those

associated with the historical avant­garde and the high
modernists–these collages are legible, and they tend to be
emphatically narrative. This is in part a consequence of the technique,
for the cut­up leaves large sections of text untouched. Instead of the
total destruction of meaning associated with dada literary collage, or
the precious, isolated image of the surrealist newspaper collage, the
cut­up technique tends to offer alternative narratives. Consider one of
Gysin’s earliest cut­ups:

It is impossible to estimate the damage. Anything put out up to now is

like pulling a figure of the air.
Six distinguished British women said to us later, indicating the crowd of
chic young women who were fingering samples, “If our prices weren’t as
114 Banash

good or better, they wouldn’t come. Eve is eternal.”

(I’m going right back to the Sheraton Carlton and call the Milwaukee
Braves.)
Miss Hanna Pugh the slim model–a member of the Diners’ club, the
American Express Credit Cards, etc.–drew from a piggy bank a talent which
is the very quintessence of the British Female sex.
“People aren’t crazy,” she said. “Now that Hazard has banished my
timidity I feel that I, too, can live on streams in the area where people are
urged to be watchful.”
A huge wave rolled in from the wake of Hurricane Gracie and bowled a
married couple off a jetty. The Wife’s body was found–the husband
was missing, presumed drowned.
Tomorrow the moon will be 228,400 miles from earth and the sun almost
93,000,000 miles away. (6)

Though this text has been cut from newspaper articles and magazine
advertisements, there remains enough sense in it that it does not feel
illegible, but enough of the connections have been cut to create an
ambiguity. The first lines no doubt belong with the account of the
hurricane with which this cut­up begins and ends. However, the
“disaster” is now abstract. Because the next ready­made element is a
description of commerce, perhaps even an advertisement, it is
tempting to read the image of “chic” consumers as the referent of that
initial disaster. There is then another odd fragment in which the ready­
made text articulates the beauty of the model in terms of capital, the
“piggy bank” of femininity. This constructs the series “women,”
“beauty,” “credit,” and “capital” and connects it to the “disaster” of
the first lines. By the end, the heterosexual couple is destroyed,
perhaps associating women with danger again (Gysin was a notorious
misogynist, and would certainly have welcomed such a connection)
and the exact physical location of the earth in relation to the moon
and the sun for a particular day is given. A rewrite indeed, and while
there are a number of readings possible, there is certainly sense here.
 Invention 115

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the technique is that the words
and images of everyday life (a newspaper story about a hurricane,
accounts of consumption, advertisements) are turned into a warning
about the disastrous consequences of those things, but one that retains
enough narrative sense to offer more than a critical position or a
deconstruction. Instead, this cut­up provides an alternative narrative
that carries the possibilities of a different practice. By knowing
exactly where one is–location being emphasized in the last lines–the
reader might well attempt to avoid the disaster in the future.
The cut­ups of Minutes to Go take the form of prose, but
Gysin went further, creating actual cut­and­paste collages of many of
his cut­ups, often in collaboration with William Burroughs. In almost
all of these, he employed the form of a grid, which he created with
special ink rollers he had designed himself. Terry Wilson emphasizes
this magic side, noting that “the cabalistic grid was incorporated into
his work and his paintings … in Islam, the world is a vast emptiness
like the Sahara. Events are written: Mektoub. Likewise, Gysin’s
empty deserts became written deserts.”30 The grid thus came to
represent the ways in which a magic writing structures and fills a
universe. Yet, in so many ways, Gysin’s grid operates just as the
newspaper grid, which strings its columns down the empty paper by
the hundreds. It produces the same sort of random and chance
juxtapositions, which Gysin names magic. Yet Gysin’s approach to
the creation of grids was hardly magic. Indeed, his handmade roller is
a roller still, offering a standardized form, not unlike the metal drums
of the vast rotary presses of the newspapers. Working alone, Gysin
tended to produce palimpsests like his calligraphic paintings, which
reduce language to pure materiality as one letter is overwritten by
myriad others. Yet, always the grid itself remains visible. Working
with Burroughs, Gysin often collaborated on newspaper collages that
incorporated the very same grids.
Gysin and Burroughs were not alone in their obsession with
the newspaper. A whole new generation of fine artists would continue
116 Banash

to take it up, ultimately including the silk­screens of Andy Warhol and

Shepard Fairey. Yet even at mid­century the move away from abstract
expression found painters like Robert Rauschenberg again collaging
papers.
John Cage found in the newspaper a key metaphor to
understand painter Robert Rauschenberg’s innovative and disturbing
collage­paintings of the 1950s, the “combines.” In Silence, Cage
writes, “There is no more subject in a combine that there is in a page
from a newspaper. Each thing that is there is a subject. It is a situation
involving multiplicity.”31 In addition to the layers of industrial paint
and household fabrics, mirrors and taxidermied animals, photographs
and toys, clothes and appliances, there are almost always newspaper
clippings themselves in the combines. Rauschenberg’s critics have
been at a loss to cope with the semiotic excesses of these works.
However, I want to explore how their attempts to articulate the
problem of collage address the formal problems of the newspaper
itself, and illuminate the end of the newspaper as a generative form
for collage.
In his recent review of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of
Art’s retrospective of Rauschenberg’s combines, Yves­Alain Bois
notes that viewers tend to adopt one of two interpretive strategies
which are themselves encoded into the works, “both of which concern
readability–or rather, its opposite.”32 On the one hand, the works
present themselves as vast and simultaneous aggregations of so much
material, that one can only stand at a distance, responding to a
combine as a work of sculpture–in essence, not reading it. Certainly
Rauschenberg himself seems to have made some combines for just
this purpose. Minutiae, for instance, served as part of the set for a
Merce Cunningham production in 1954. As Bois has it, “try to
decipher the text of a [newspaper] cartoon while doing somersaults!”
(245). Bois has little patience for those who would offer a close
reading of a combine by seizing on one or more of its details: Any
attempt to offer a reading based on these fragments seems both
 Invention 117

arbitrary and infinite–thus, futile. Bois reiterates Leo Steinberg’s

comment about Rauschenberg’s combines: “We shall have
dissertations galore, including perusals of the fine print in the
newspaper scraps that abound in Rauschenberg’s pictures.”33 Bois
suggests that the very form of the combines produces this very
problem, which he calls suspended viewpoint: “Indeed, in almost all
of the Combines through the late ’50s, including even the smallest
examples, massive discrepancies of internal scale prevent the
beholder from resting assured in a given viewpoint and thus preclude
any synthetic reading of the individual works, except of the most
generalized nature” (245). The combine, then, is no different than the
newspaper itself when, taken in its totality, is just as unreadable.
While this may seem a surprising statement, the work of Kenneth
Goldsmith dramatically performs this fact of the newspaper.
Throughout this chapter, I have tried to show the ways in
which contradiction animates the newspaper form. From the
introduction of affordable dailies in the middle of the nineteenth
century until the demise of the analog age in the last years of the
twentieth century, the newspaper remained the ur­form of collage. In a
remarkable work entitled Day, experimental writer Kenneth
Goldsmith gives us a final permutation, and, I believe, the clearest
statement of the end of the newspaper form as a defining influence on
the future. Reversing Mallarmé’s formal complaint about the form of
the newspaper, Goldsmith has put an entire day of the New York Times
back between the covers of a book, thus returning it to mysterious and
virginal folds: “I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity,”
he announces on the back cover of Day. “On Friday, September 1,
2000, I began retyping the day’s New York Times, word for word,
letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand
corner, page by page.”34
Goldsmith’s remarkable work is astonishing at a number of
levels. To begin with, it is simply shocking to see the depth and
weight of Day, 836 pages of an oversized trade paperback. There are
118 Banash

the endless choices of style that confronted Goldsmith, such as how to

handle the copy of advertisements, captions, lists, stock quotations,
and other information that depends so heavily on the context of now­
absent images. However, perhaps the most shocking aspect of Day is
not to be found in the writing but rather in Goldsmith’s reading.
Goldsmith chose Truman Capote’s famous response to Jack
Kerouac’s claim that he wrote On the Road in two weeks as the
epigraph for Day. Quipped Capote, “That’s not writing. That’s
typing.” However, I’m tempted to respond to Goldsmith that Day isn’t
typing at all, but rather an extreme act of reading. Goldsmith has
literally read every word of this issue of the New York Times,
something that no other reader of a newspaper, no matter how devoted
or careful, could possibly do without an immense amount of effort
and discipline. He has read every single financial listing, not just
those of interest. He has registered every word of every
advertisement, classified ad, and legal notice. In essence, he has given
the paper the very kind of attention that only the most careful of
readers devote to books. As such, it only makes sense that this
practice returns newspaper pages to the folds of Mallarmé’s spiritual
instrument, the book. In doing so, Goldsmith recapitulates the very
problem of perspective raised by Rauschenberg’s combines, and
newspapers themselves. Readers of the combines, like readers of
newspapers, never take in the whole, which is always simultaneously
both too large and too small. In his act of extreme reading, Goldsmith
has engaged in a stunt of physical endurance that few could match,
and fewer would want to even attempt. After all, this isn’t Finnegan’s
Wake, but simply an ephemeral paper. Yet the exact nature of its
ephemerality is changing in the face of new technological pressures.
Goldsmith’s work is a sign that the newspaper has ceased to
function as it did during the heyday of modernism. As early as 1964,
Marshall McLuhan predicted the end of the newspaper: “The
classified ads (and stock­market quotations) are the bedrock of the
press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse
 Invention 119

daily information be found, the press will fold” (186). Indeed, the
press as a paper and ink institution is imploding, and Goldsmith has
folded the press back into the book, and daily newspapers are
reinventing themselves as ever­shifting, constantly updated web
pages. In comparison to the virtual shimmer of their web incarnations,
paper and ink papers now begin to look far more solid and organized,
conservative even, than the modernists might have ever dreamed.
Given the shifting updates of the web, and the almost immediate
obsolescence and inaccessibility of so much web publishing,
Goldsmith’s act was only possible with the paper and ink version of
the Times. In this digital age, ads change, or their context with one
story and not another isn’t the same for every reader. Perhaps as both
paper and ink creations, both the form of the book and the newspaper
are far more similar, and far closer to modernism than the virtual
world now overtaking and transforming our reading practices.
Beginning with cubists in the early decades of the twentieth
century, the newspaper has remained the most important material of
collage. Its radical juxtapositions of texts, advertisements, and
images, its modernity, its status as a ubiquitous material of everyday
life, its ideological functions, and the wealth of material it offers to
collage artists makes it the ur­form of collage practices. It is
remarkable how fine­art collage begins with the newspaper, but how
flexible it remains as a form. Not only did the historical avant­garde
depend on the newspaper as a formal model and a raw material, high
modernists including poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William
Carlos Williams all used it as ready­made material and formal model
for their work. Novelists like John Dos Passos also relied on the form,
and this continued throughout the century to the 1990s with the work
of writers like Raymond Federman and Kenneth Goldsmith. Though
the newspaper is often thought of as the media form defining the
nineteenth century, with cinema coming to define the twentieth
century, as I have shown here, twentieth­century artists depended
upon the newspaper form for their formal innovations, and as much as
120 Banash

the cinema did have a profound influence on modernist and

postmodernist aesthetics, many of the most characteristic techniques
of modernism–juxtaposition, montage, fragmentation, simultaneity,
etc.–have their origin in the form of the newspaper’s folded sheets as
much or more than in the celluloid splices of cinema.
 CRITIQUE: COLLAGE AND THE POLITICS
OF THE CUT

The technique of collage is not strictly aligned with the transgressive

forces of the avant­garde; it can just as easily serve the most
reactionary and conservative desires, and this fact is brilliantly
illustrated in at least one story about the invention of that most
politically charged form of collage, photomontage.1 In Courrier
Dada, Raoul Hausmann recalls that in the summer of 1918 he was
vacationing in the small town of Heidebrink and noticed on the walls
of almost every home “a color lithograph depicting the image of a
solider in front of a barracks. To make this military memento more
personal, in place of the head, one glued on a photographic portrait. In
a flash–I saw instantly–one could make a “tableau” entirely from cut­
up photos.”2 What is remarkable about this story is not Hausmann’s
sudden insight that one could do photomontage–this technique was
inevitably being developed by many3–but rather the anonymous
practice of these unknown families who not only cut up photographs
of loved ones but interpolated them into ideological fantasy. The
shocking power of this gesture is rooted in the reality of the
photograph and the power of mass media to concentrate and amplify
ideological fantasies.
The mass media of the early twentieth century had grown
vastly in scope and power, and it was a major force constituting the
modern nation­state. Benedict Anderson maintains that the newspaper
structured the time of the nation, allowing people who had never met,
who more often than not had conflicting interests, to imagine
122 Banash

themselves as part of a single, abstract entity to which they owed

allegiance. The colored lithograph functions as a fantasy of this
national unity as well. The image of the brave and erect soldier
standing before the barracks is essentially a cartoon, a mere paper
tiger unless a family sends one of its sons to stand in that place of
fantasy. However, that colorful but abstract image creates a place and
models a nationalist desire, and the actual inclusion of the photograph
makes it something more–it interpolates reality into the fantasy. W. J.
T. Mitchell suggests that military recruiting posters are so powerful,
in part, because they can be reproduced “in millions of identical
prints, the sort of fertility that is available to images and to artists. The
‘disembodiment’ of [the] mass­produced image is countered by its
concrete embodiment and location as picture in relation to recruiting
stations (and the bodies of real recruits) all over the nation.”4 In
Mitchell’s example, what makes it concrete and individually effective
is the singular location, but the families Hausmann observes go much
further by hanging the image in their home and then inserting the
photographic portrait of their son. There is something eerie in this
gesture, since so clearly the lithograph is a fantasy, its unreality
unwittingly unmasked by the inclusion of the photographic medium
that concretizes and particularizes not only the image, but shows us
how the fantasy image has done its work and found a real stand­in for
the colorful but two­dimensional soldier now given a real face. While
the state could simply print up any number of such images, they
would only become meaningful as disparate and much less docile
humans took their places. Though many critics repeat Hausmann’s
story, no one has reproduced the mementos he found. While what he
saw might have been simply a local phenomenon, more than likely
they were examples of reservistenbild. These nineteenth­ and
twentieth­century mementos are fantastic, colorful, and playful mass­
produced posters, often in ornate frames, celebrating patriotism and
military service. Often they were explicitly designed to include a
 Critique 123

personal photograph, leaving a space cut out for the individual’s

photographic portrait.5
It is this complex play of colorful fantasy and stark black­
and­white reality that makes Hausmann’s example and the
reservistenbild phenomenon so telling, for it is a perfect synecdoche
for the essential operation of ideology in which a fantasy structures a
reality. Photography is an essential element in this, for it offered a
new kind of alibi for ideology in its seeming objectivity. André Bazin
brilliantly captures the unprecedented effect of photography in the
first years of the twentieth century, observing that it created a
uniquely objective representation of the world that did not depend on
the intervening subjectivity of the artist. Overcoming both psychology
and the mark of the hand, it seemed that light­sensitive films recorded
an absolutely objective index of whatever passed before the lens. He
maintains “[t]he aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in
its power to lay bare the realities.”6 For Bazin, this aesthetic power
lay in the photograph’s ability to cut through or wipe away the very
ideas through which we see the world. In a flight of lyricism, he
extols this: “It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of
the objective world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there the
gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all
those ways of seeing it, those piled­up preconceptions, that spiritual
dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present
it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my
love” (15). Bazin is hardly alone is worshiping the photograph as the
technological triumph that wipes clean our window on reality.
Photography would lay bare not only the world, but ourselves, and
Bazin distinguishes the portrait in oils from the snapshot, explaining
that “photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms
time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption,” and so the family
portrait is no longer an idealized impression of pigments suspended in
oil, but rather “the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment
in their duration, freed from their destiny” (14).
124 Banash

Essentially, Bazin is correct about the tremendous truth­force

of photography, and in this Roland Barthes would agree, observing
that the astonishing force of photography is that “which no realist
painting could give me, that they were there; what I see is not a
memory, an imagination, a reconstitution, a piece of Maya, such as art
lavishes upon us, but reality in a past state: at once the past and the
real.”7 However, what both Bazin and Barthes have in mind here are
actual photographs in a kind of pristine state, without commentary or
connotation. In this particular insight, both neglect all the ways that
this power is then framed and manipulated, called upon but mediated
by frames, borders, sequences, captions, or, in the example of
Hausmann’s humble, homemade image, inserted into the very grit and
grime of human fantasy. Barthes develops a much more nuanced view
of the photograph as it appears in the media, and in his essay, “The
Photographic Message,” he observes that illustrated magazines and
photographs in newspapers are quite a different matter, and his subtle
analysis distinguishes the denotation of photographs (their
unblemished ontological status–they were there) from the complex
layers of meaning, framing, directing that force–connotation. “From
this point of view, the image–grasped immediately by an inner
metalanguage, language itself–in actual fact has no denoted state, is
immersed for its very social existence in at least an initial layer of
connotation, that of the categories of language.”8 Nonetheless, the
photograph thus takes on a mythological function, underwriting the
truth of the connotations and languages loaded onto it: its unique
ontology always remains underneath its manifold possible meanings,
a finger pointing to some incontrovertible denotation–“the photograph
can ‘confirm,’” observes Barthes (30).
Hausmann’s observation of the patriotic family pasting
together their memento is thus a kind of sentimental and brutal
allegory of the far more subtle and utterly pervasive operations of the
mass media as it deploys image­texts. The families used the
photograph to confirm the patriotic fantasy in a gesture of staggering
 Critique 125

conservatism, and so their gesture is identical to the mass media itself,

in which cadres of professional editors, writers, and photographers
stitched together the images, texts, frames, sequences, headlines, and
slogans–underwritten with the confirmation of photographs–which
organized and disseminated the nationalist jingoism and paranoia that
would stoke the fires of World War I and after would abet the rise of
fascism and the lunacy of the Cold War. Hausmann and other Berlin
dadas grasped exactly the power of the mass media to project a
reality, and they responded to it by creating collages that would use
many of the same techniques, though amplified, stripped bare, and
unmasking the ideological operations of the media from which they
drew their source materials. Georges Hugnet neatly sums up the
relationship of dada to the fully­realized world of print media defining
modern everyday life, suggesting that dada only amplifies and
exposes what is already going on: “As though one day, a Monday for
example, the Cadum baby had come down off his billboard to jostle
you in the bus.” In short, “Dada was born of what it hated.”9 Of
course, the Cadum baby was jostling people, as such advertising
images, illustrated magazines, and advertisements blanketed cities
with illustrations, photographs, and texts that demanded constant
attention. The image­texts of the newspapers and illustrated
magazines gazed on an emerging world of industry and consumption,
celebrating the might of heavy industry and presenting a cornucopia
of both luxurious and laughable goods for sale. Both Raoul
Hausmann and Hannah Höch would rework this mass media into the
most formidable and iconic collages of the Berlin dadas. The fantasy,
absurdity, and banality of consumer capitalism became sinister in the
brutal reality of World War I and the privations in Germany during the
Weimar period, and along with other dadas, the work of John
Heartfield would culminate in montages that turned the ideologies
and techniques of media and nationalism inside out. However, unlike
Hausmann and Höch, Heartfield’s work would come closest to the
126 Banash

mass media, exceeding its polish and achieving staggering circulation

for the times.
Heartfield’s earliest montages, in collaboration with George
Grosz, had something of the same spirit of improvisation and folk­art
response as Hausmann’s bourgeois mementos. The painter, Grosz, had
already been sending “care packages” with absurdist anti­war
messages. One of Grosz’s friends recalls the contents of a package he
received at the front in 1916:

The parcel contained two starched shirt fronts, one white, the other
flowered, a pair of cuffs, a dainty shoehorn, a set of bags of tea samples,
which, according to hand­written labels, should arouse patience, sweet
dreams, respect for authority, and fidelity to the throne ... Glued on a
cardboard in wild disorder were advertisements for trusses, fraternity song
books, and enriched dogfood, labels for Schnapps and wine bottles, photos
from illustrated magazines–arbitrarily cut out and absurdly joined
together.10

The contents are striking, for the clothes of a bourgeois dandy

and the patriotic messages attached to the domestic rituals of the tea suggest
leisure unavailable to those at the front but enjoyed by their rulers, while
the advertising images reveal a world of shallow consumer pleasures. For
Douglas Kahn, “The trivia enclosed from the home front acts to trivialize
the decimation at the front by displaying what exactly the fighting is meant
to preserve.” (23)
Heartfield and Grosz met in Berlin and began working
together on montages; they are often credited with the invention of
photomontage techniques.11 The two began creating an entire series of
postcards that carried similar anti­war messages, and seemingly these
managed to pass through the mail to the front, for the censors were
unable to understand this emerging visual photomontage form as they
would have plainer slogans or statements. Even more interestingly,
“they resembled photomontaged postcards and carte visites
circulating during that time, usually glorifying the war or Kaiser, and
 Critique 127

reminding soldiers they were fighting for the wife, kids and country
(incl. truss and dogfood) back home” (25). The inability of the
censors to recognize the anti­war messages suggests the emerging
visual languages of photomontage and collage techniques were
already a part of the mass media itself, and its subversion by dada
artists was not so much an outright invention as a tactical response.
Heartfield’s most enduring, politically committed collages
would come well after the war, during Hitler’s rise to power. These
would not have the anarchic dada playfulness typical of Raoul
Hausmann or Hannah Höch. Instead, Heartfield was refining and
developing all the most sophisticated techniques of the montage from
the illustrated press, but in the service of critique rather than
propaganda. The first years of the 1930s in Germany saw a chaos of
political mass media on the streets where the poster, the sandwich
board, the newspaper, and the illustrated magazine were the major
arenas of campaigning. On the left in particular, innovative graphics
were the visual embodiment of a potentially communist modernity
and looked to both American advertising and Soviet propaganda for
models. In her analysis of photomontage in the Berlin campaigns of
1932, Sabine Kriebel observes: “Pictures reveal sidewalks strewn
with electoral propaganda, cluttering up the gutters, littering shop
fronts–the political battle literally underfoot. Aggressively large visual
propaganda was plastered on housefronts near the Potsdamer Platz
and illuminated at night. Advertising copy regularly vied with
political slogans in these public spaces–‘Vote Hitler!’ contended with
‘White Teeth’ for the attention of the passer­by.”12 Developing
unparalleled and powerful montages, Heartfield would influence later
artists and advertisers for generations and force the Nazis to compete
in similar visual styles. Working for the leftist magazine Arbeiter­
Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), Heartfield created images that circulated
some 500,00 copies a week–a staggeringly large audience. These
cover illustrations often became posters as well, sometimes
blanketing the streets of Berlin. Strikingly, Heartfield abandoned his
128 Banash

John Heartfield, Millions are Standing Behind Me or Little Man Asks

for Big Gifts. October 16, 1932. © 2012 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / VG Bild­Kunst, Bonn. Art Resource, New York.
 Critique 129

earlier, more ragged dada collages and disjunctive assemblages,

choosing instead to exploit the power of the photograph to undo
ideological illusions by gesturing at repressed realities. The power of
this work comes from its insistent incorporation of Nazi images and
slogans, and it produced tremendous critical frisson as the ideological
fantasy clashed with a repressed and brutal reality. In this, it matters
that the words and gestures of fascism are countered by the truth­
force of photography, despite the obvious though masterful
manipulations performed by Monteur Heartfield, as he often called
himself.13
Perhaps Hitler’s most iconic image was his fascist salute,
incorporated into both spectacular rallies and rituals of everyday life.
This mechanical gesture performed the ethos of unity and ambition, a
seductive image of violence and triumph. For an October 1932 cover
of AIZ, Heartfield begins with Hitler himself, offering a rather limp
version of his signature gesture. There is no doubt that this is Hitler,
captured in a real moment, and not an artist’s fantasy. Behind him in
the seamless montage stands a photograph of a fat man in the dark
suit of a capitalist. This faceless figure dwarfs the puny Hitler, into
whose saluting palm he thrusts a handful of money. Hitler’s claim that
“Millions stand behind me!” is neatly printed between the two. The
image clearly shows the diminutive dictator as the face of capital, his
backers not masses of Germans, but a corpulent industrialist’s money.
Heartfield’s cover is not simply a photograph, and it does not
unambiguously capture a real moment. Rather, it uses photographs to
gesture at a hidden reality, and much of its force depends on the
denotative force of the photograph to confirm, and yet this is not
unrelated to the family pasting a picture of a son into a patriotic scene.
The photograph of Hitler and the slogan are ready­made propaganda
that Heartfield has gone to work on. He has not made up the Nazi
gesture, photograph, or the slogan, but recontextualizing them, he
drags them against the grain into a reality they would suppress.
Perspective plays a clear role, as the montage makes the capitalist a
130 Banash

looming figure. Thus the ready­made photographs and slogans are

transformed into a critical statement that urges us to read against the
grain, to consider a different truth. For Sabine Kriebel, Heartfield’s
montages are not simple conformations of some obvious and
unquestionable truth. (After all, millions of poor Germans did stand
behind Hitler, though certainly that wasn’t the whole truth.) Kriebel
observes that “Heartfield offers us, in his own words, a helpful non­
pejorative working definition of visual propaganda, namely the
circulation of a particular set of ideas to the widest possible audience.
Take out the references to revolution, and it could be confused with
advertising” (97).14
Sabine Kriebel underscores the contexts of advertising and
the Nazi propaganda machine, comparing Heartfield’s montages with
those circulating in the Illustrierter Beobachter, a weekly put out by
the Nazi party, and making use of dozens of cover montages and
photographs in illustrated stories. For instance, on a July 1932 cover,
we see a very different montage of a saluting Hitler with the
perspective exactly the reverse of Heartfield’s. Here, a medium shot
of the leader fills the page, making him an imposing figure. He gazes
out over a montaged long­shot of adoring troops, figures tiny and
uniform in comparison with their leader. The caption reads, “On
Towards the Hour of German Destiny.” Forced by the polish and
reach of the left and the commercial press’ far more nuanced use of
photographs, they struggled to compete. The Nazis were trying to use
these techniques of photography and advertising to promote their
vision. Yet the balance between truth­force and what Barthes names
connotation becomes clear when Matthew Teitelbaum observes:
“When consumer objects, industrial images, and political leaders are
enlarged in scale and placed in the foreground of a composition, for
example, their importance in the pictorial narrative is underlined. The
compositional device of dramatic foregrounding provokes the viewer
to re­think the relations between objects, to re­establish a hierarchy of
 Critique 131

correspondences. In this sense, among others, montage practice is

about radical realignments of power.”15
Comparing Heartfield’s montage of Hitler’s salute with the
cover of the Illustrierter Beobachter perfectly reveals this staging of
power, and it is perhaps the key to understanding the critical force of
montage and collage techniques. Manipulating scale, context, and
relations, the collage artist rearranges reality without ever giving in
fully to the fantastic. No matter how fanciful or unlikely the
arrangement, the readymades or photographs nonetheless ground the
whole in an unquestionable reality, even if that reality is simply the
mediascape of words and images that constitute the modern everyday.
Working with the photograph in particular, Heartfield’s montages
would take advantage of this power to disclose the relations between
the Nazi regime and capitalist interests, clearly emphasizing the larger
power of the latter. Just as the reservistenbild’s perspective would
always subordinate the small photo of the individual solider to the
larger fantastic iconography of the nation, so Nazi montages would
show Hitler as a large, heroic figure. Heartfield’s montages would use
inverted perspectives to show the true dimensions of fascism and
capitalism. Thus the politics of montage are largely a matter of scale
and proportion, and critical collages create powerful maps to
complex, hidden relationships. Finding a scale to gauge relative
forces, montage’s critical moment is often made by reversing the
scale of any particular understanding of the world, making large what
a particular politics would repress and making small what it would
celebrate.
Working with photographs, but also with the illustrations and
texts of mass media and propaganda, the dadas largely rejected
romantic and expressionist identities. Their practice was less art and
more a work of revealing. In Courrier Dada, Raoul Hausmann writes
that “photomontage,” applied both to literal montages and more
diverse collage works, was “a term translating our aversion to playing
132 Banash

the artist, we considered ourselves engineers (and from this came our
preference for work clothes, overalls), we claimed to construct, to
‘take up our work’” (42). This machine aesthetic expression resonates
with Bazin’s evocation of the camera, with its objective mechanism,
“the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of
the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in
mind.” For Bazin, “the objective nature of photography confers on it a
quality of credibility, absent from all other picture­making” (13). In
their montages and collages, the dadas didn’t invent a world, they
merely went to work on what they found, arranging it, presenting it.
Abandoning the mark of the hand, the filters and projections of
subjective vision, their collages carried profound critical force, even
when they assumed fantastic forms. Their material was the world,
even if that world was made up of the unreal images circulating in
magazines and posters, propaganda and advertising. Though the
monteur would alter proportions and associations, the work is always
charged with a current of reality, the constant whisper of affirmation
that this is the truth of the world itself.
The montages John Heartfield made for AIZ were not
primarily works of art hung on a gallery wall or seen only by a few
cognoscenti, and should always be thought of first and foremost as
attempts to intervene in a moment of crisis. Something of their
seamless polish, as well as their wit and immediate legibility, comes
from their work as political interventions, and for this Heartfield
abandoned his more radical and fragmented early work. His earlier
montages made in collaboration with George Grosz brought together
more varied materials, chaotic juxtapositions of newspapers,
illustrations, photographs, and texts; in all, a larger number of
elements, and their arrangement always emphasized the seams of the
collage method of cutting and pasting. Heartfield’s decision to work
primarily through the photomontage rather than more varied collage
techniques at moments of crises suggests a powerful distinction
between the two modes. This distinction is not only a question of the
 Critique 133

primacy of the photograph, but also the modes of using not only
photographs but all ready­made materials in all kinds of assemblages.
Assemblage can emphasize either the fragments (the moment of
cutting) or become far more seamless, relying on the consistency of
meticulous pasting (montage) that all but erases the perception of the
individual fragments. Indeed, the difference between these two
moments not only helps to understand Heartfield, but becomes a
major dividing line between surrealism and dada generally, and
perhaps of collage itself.
Unlike earlier art movements which tended to be defined by
the development of a particular and recognizable style, both dada and
surrealism comprise dozens of materials and modes, from
performances and poetry, to manifestoes, paintings, photographs, and
more. In what sense can we compare Heartfield’s late photomontages
to the far more fantastic work of Hannah Höch or even the anarchic
performances at Cabaret Voltaire? Rosalind Krauss asks this question
of surrealism in an attempt to cope with its myriad modes, and rather
than trying to reduce surrealism to a particular sense or operation, she
looks for a broader field that might offer a truly dialectical synthesis
of its literary and visual productions.16 For Krauss, what unites the
projects of surrealism is not a particular visual style or a broader
thematics, but its relationship to a world of mass media and its most
modern form, the photograph and the caption. Writing about the vast
scope and number of surrealist journals, she argues that “one becomes
convinced that they more than anything else are the true objects
produced by surrealism.” Following Walter Benjamin’s essay “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Krauss
concludes that surrealism is itself “art­after­photography, namely, the
illustrated magazine, which is to say, photograph plus text.”17 Like
dada then, Krauss suggests that surrealism is best understood through
the broader context of mass media and its profound effects on
perception and the question of reality. Indeed, one might grasp the
illustrated magazine as either a chaotic and deceptive form or a
134 Banash

radical way of arriving at truth through profound juxtapositions.

While Siegfried Kracauer was critical of the new form, seeing it as a
“snow storm” of irrational confusion, Benjamin was typically more
optimistic, seeing especially in Soviet examples the possibility of
dialectical truth in the new form. For Krauss, there is a distinction
between dada’s use of the image­text and the ways the surrealist
employed it, and she observes that “in dada montage the experience
of blanks or spacing is very strong, for between the silhouettes of the
photographed forms the white page announces itself as the medium
that both combines and separates them” (106). It is fascinating that
Krauss turns toward the ground of collage here to make the point, for
it is more forcefully articulated as the cut–the ragged edge of each
fragment that tells us it was pulled from another source and another
context. Krauss formulates this quite clearly, however, when she
maintains: “It is spacing that makes it clear–as it was to Heartfield,
Tretyakov, Brecht, Aragon–that we are not looking at reality, but at
the world infested by interpretation or signification, which is to say,
reality distended by the gaps or blanks which are the formal
preconditions of the sign” (107). The dadas tended to let the seams
show. For Krauss, surrealist practice is more akin to the later
interventionist techniques of Heartfield that erase this sense of rupture
and fragmentation. She notes that the surrealist photographers tended
to avoid collages in favor of more subtle manipulations like
composite printing; that “[t]heir interest was in the seamless unity of
the print.” Thus, Krauss maintains: “Given this special status with
regard to the real, being, that is, a kind of deposit of the real itself, the
manipulations wrought by the surrealist photographers–the spacings
and doublings–are intended to register the spacings and doublings of
that very reality of which this photograph is merely the faithful trace.
In this way the photographic medium is exploited to produce a
paradox: the paradox of reality constituted as sign–or presence
transformed into absence, into representation, into spacing, into
writing” (111–12). Thus, while dadas playfully cut into the media
 Critique 135

world around them, reveling in the irrational juxtapositions and

fantastic associations of their collages, the surrealists tried to
represent those very same cuts in reality not as the world of the
cutting artists, but ruptures in the real itself, discovered by the artists,
not created but found.
This difference between the made and the found rupture
might well be generalized not only to dada and surrealism but also to
modes of using and presenting fragments throughout the century. To
delight in the cutting, in essence to leave those traces of the artists
cutting into the materials of reality is to suggest a profoundly
subversive attitude toward the materials, which are almost always
those of the mass media. The cutting gesture is one of subversion and
critique, an assault on accepted perceptions and representations,
violently rearranging the media consensus. Though the artists might
create profoundly dialectical illuminations, there is a sense that they
have been produced rather than found. The seamless image of rupture
is something entirely different. The artist has not entered into it as a
subversive, but rather more as a scientist, revealing what is there,
even if what is there is a tremendous rupture or rift, a shocking image
that might force us to reevaluate the reality in which we live. Thus
Heartfield’s early dada productions are those of the cutting
subversive. However, faced with the rise of Hitler, Heartfield used the
most seamless techniques possible, always trying to present his work
not as the wild force of an artist’s rearrangement, but a shocking
discovery of something already there, needing only the sudden gaze
of the lens to manifest it to the public.
Perhaps another way to trace this distinction is through
particular contexts of intervention. Dada was born of war protests,
and its animating force would always be interventionist. If Heartfield,
Tzara, Höch, and others chose to emphasize the moments of cutting
or pasting, their works were always aimed at pivot points of power,
where they sought to unhook the smoothly functioning limbs of a
media­military­industrial aggression. They saw the media most
136 Banash

immediately as a battlefield for hearts and minds in an immediate

struggle with life on the line. Thus the particular ruptures and
irrationalities their work revealed were almost always profoundly
political in the most brutal sense of the term. The surrealists, most
working after the war, turned their gaze inward, seeing the world
around them as a psychic battlefield. If dada celebrated absurdity, its
spirit was to drown out warmongering with laughter. It would be
difficult to imagine Tzara or Heartfield agreeing with Breton’s idea of
the most surrealist–read transformative–act as a man firing
indiscriminately into a crowd. For dada, that was just the logic of the
state itself. The terrain of surrealism was not public protest but a
profoundly inward meditation on the psyche itself revealed through
uncanny moments of everyday life. The dadas lived in a world of
random state violence and instability, and there was no need to break
through a façade of normative sutures to reveal the potentials of the
real simmering underneath; the sutures had already come undone.
Laughter and cutting satire seemed the most urgent weapons to
deploy against a homicidal state madness propped up by an
overwhelming sense of world­historical self­importance. The context
of surrealism was Pairs, well after the war, and its terrain was the
banality and seeming immutability of everyday life. Surrealism
sought to open the sutures of family, capital, and reason that knit
together middle­class normativity, and to find poetic means to
transfigure the world and the self. As Breton stated in the first
“Manifesto of Surrealism,” “I believe in the future resolution of these
two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory,
into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”18 To
do so, Breton more often than not chose the pose of the scientist,
presenting works of art, poems, collages, photographs, and more as
empirical evidence, the end results confirming the experiments
conducted by the artists. Much of surrealism’s rhetoric and its visual
codes were drawn from the sciences, and even at its most militant, the
journal La Révolution surréaliste was modeled on the scientific
 Critique 137

journal La Nature. Indeed, the self­portrait in collage, Automatic

Writing, presents the artist as scientist, with Breton looking up from
his microscope. Yet the real terrain of surrealism was never nature
itself–as it would be for science–but the complex realities and the
problems of normativity played out in an urban consumer culture.

Surrealism and the Readymade

The surrealists were among the first to fully exploit what Daniel Bell
would later call the cultural contradictions of capitalism. While the
smooth functioning of consumer culture would depend on a
seamlessly regulated life of work stabilized by family life, advertising
would attempt to unleash ferocious, undeniable desires, all
concentrated in the powers of objects. Advertisers eroticize even
everyday objects, and the necromancy of the commodity endows
them with powerful, seemingly supernatural forces that promise to
transform or fulfill us, or, at the very least, trouble the smoothly
functioning operations of family life and regimen of Taylorization.
The confluence of the supernatural, the erotic, and the commodity
come together often in both surrealist art and in its best literature.
Breton himself writes how the mysterious Nadja “enjoyed imagining
herself as a butterfly whose body consisted of a Mazda (Nadja) bulb
towards which rose a charmed snake (and now I am invariably
disturbed when I pass the luminous Mazda sign on the main
boulevards, covering almost the entire façade of the former Théâtre
du Vaudeville where, in fact, two rams do confront one another in a
rainbow light.”19 Not satisfied with just the description, Breton
illustrates the account with a photograph of this advertisement,
“having the documentary impact of illustrative evidence” (qtd. in
Krauss 99). Nadja imagines herself as a perfect surrealist object, the
hollow, feminine lightbulb transformed by the addition of wings, a
synthesis of the banal and the fantastic, while the phallic snake
reaches for her and, presumably, she hovers unobtainable above it.
Breton is struck by her desire to incarnate the god of Zoroastrian
138 Banash

light, Mazda, and is disturbed by the confirmation of the

advertisement, which brings together the commodity object
transfigured into supernatural and erotic power. Though the ad plays
on the still miraculously modern invention of electric light, Breton
sees more in it, for the Mazda lightbulb and its advertisement now
take on a frisson of the banal, the supernatural, and the erotic that
define both a sign of modernity (electric light), but are figured not
only as modern, but as an ancient, supernatural god now caught up
with the mysterious Nadja and his encounters with her. In this, the
advertisement is disturbing but what seems like a cheap come­on
turns out to be a confirmation of his experiences, and this is the
critical moment of much surrealist collage and assemblage. Taking the
promises and fantasies of commodities and advertisements at their
word, expecting that they really do objectify a world of profound
erotic and psychic forces, and charting their disruptions, powers, and
imbrications in the web of everyday life constitutes the critical force
of surrealist assemblages and collages, indeed their fundamental
relationship to urban commodity, culture, and media. For this to
function, the readymade is key, for the mysterious confirmation can
only come from the chance encounter with the object, with something
found, not consciously made by the artist.20
Advertising, the market place, and the mystery of the
commodity are the terrain of surrealist objects, and it is still unclear if
surrealism was critical or if it was simply operating on the cutting
edge of a nascent consumer capitalism. One could well argue that the
surrealists understood the attempts of advertisers and window dressers
to objectify mysterious and powerful desires in objects for the quite
mundane purpose of turning a profit. Johanna Malt observes that the
ready­made status of surrealist objects is key to their practice, and
“plays a role in the relationship of the object to the subjective
expression behind it, but it also contributes to the uncanny power of
the surrealist object, which often estranges the already familiar rather
than offering an entirely new experience.”21 Critics have formulated
 Critique 139

this strategy of surrealism again and again, but rarely connect it to the
strategy of advertisers. In Fables of Abundance, Jackson Lears writes
about the rise of advertising in America during the nineteenth century,
the very model of capitalism and commodity culture that would be
spread about the world in the twentieth century, and he observes that
even early advertising is animated by a “balance of tensions–within
the broader society and gradually within advertising itself–between
dreams of magical transformation and moralistic or managerial
strategies of control. The recurring motif in the cultural history of
American advertising could be characterized as the attempt to conjure
up the magic of self­transformation through purchase while at the
same time containing the subversive implications of a successful
trick.”22 Most commodities being advertised are either already banal,
or soon will be, and so the advertiser’s trick is to make them resonate
with our deepest, often unconscious erotic desires,23 endowing the
object for sale with seemingly supernatural powers of attraction and
the promise of transformations. Certainly some advertisements do
work, disturbing us enough that we do buy. In large part, this magic is
caught up in the ready­made nature of the object. Since commodity
fetishism means that the social ties between producer and consumer
have been cut, the consumer does not know how the product was
made, who made it, or under what conditions. It appears whole and
readymade into the world–a virgin birth–ripe for what Benjamin
would call an allegory, since the object could come to signify
anything to us through the complete occlusion of its origins. Both the
advertiser and the consumer are free to make it mean whatever they
wish through the magic spell of the commodity fetish. The rapid and
seamless incorporation of surrealist themes and tropes into advertising
and studio filmmaking suggests that mass culture of entertainment,
advertising, and surrealism were fundamentally compatible, and
indeed could sell one another with little trouble. In this, advertisers
and marketers were at one in their insistence on the magic of the
object, our ability to make of it a fetish not only of exchange value in
140 Banash

Marx’s precise sense, but to load it with symbolically transgressive

and transformative properties–but they stopped their pursuit at the
cash register’s ringing bell. The surrealists themselves went on
further, taking that logic to its extremes without the profit motive to
interrupt the investigation of what the readymade might mean, how it
might become an occult force calling for transformations far larger
than a mere purchase. This cultivation and release of such repressed
desire was thus a part of the media and consumer culture, but marked
a fault line, a dialectical contradiction of Taylorization and Fordism,
which created industrial and consumer goods by insisting on
rationalized production and the standardized and banal misery of
work. The surrealists obsess over ready­made objects; their collages
and assemblages cut with a critical edge, but only from the inside.
They pursue what Baudrillard called the fatal strategy, and in a sense
become the perfect subjects of advertising, ready to be seduced and
transformed by almost any object they encounter, but no longer
reigned in by either the demands of the Fordist work ethic or the
sleight of hand at the cash register; they instead demand that the
whole world be transformed immediately and in every respect, just as
the advertisers have been saying all along, and so, demanding the
complete and immediate “resolution of these two states, dream and
reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute
reality, a surreality” (14) not simply for an isolated commodity, but
for our entire experience.
In a sense, one might figure surrealism’s ultimate critical
gesture as advertising for the total transformation of life rather than an
isolated purchase, and while the force of this gesture is hard to feel
within the confines of a modern museum or the gravitas of a heavy,
glossy art book, surviving photographs and accounts of surrealist
exhibitions suggest powerfully the shop windows of commodity
capitalism. In the first “Manifesto of Surrealism,” Breton observes:
“The marvelous is not the same in every period of history: it partakes
in some obscure way of a sort of general revelation only the
 Critique 141

fragments of which come down to us: they are the romantic ruins, the
modern mannequin, or any other symbol capable of affecting the
human sensibility for a period of time” (16).24 The potential for
allegory animates both the ruin and mannequin. The romantic ruin
was a space for fantasy precisely because its practical ends were
suspended, and with just a few stones it could call out to an
impossibly beautiful or dramatic past in no way checked by the banal
or compromised uses and limits of everyday life. The mannequin
functions in a similar mode. It is a found object, made by an industrial
process instead of the hand of an artist. Its very anonymity allows it to
take on the potential of the marvelous. The mannequin also seems
consistent with Breton’s later insistence that the beauty of the
marvelous be “veiled­erotic, fixed­explosive, magic­circumstantial.”25
The modern mannequin deceives the eye, its articulable limbs capable
of striking different poses suggestive of motion, making the store
window a tableau vivant. Profoundly eroticized as an available and
utterly compliant sexual object, the clothes nonetheless veil its figure
and repress its status as an idealized if sadistic sexual fetish. This
indirection and mild repression are key to Breton’s aesthetic, fueled
by a particularly prudish delight. Breton’s final demand of the
beautiful is that magic­circumstantial, that a surrealist experience of
beauty is in part “a question of charms,” (15) and here again the
commercial mannequin answers as a kind of contemporary fetish,
seeking to cast on us the spell of the commodity in the fantasy of the
window. As a magic object of consumer capitalism, the mannequin is
almost unique. Generally, the mannequin is not for sale, existing not
as something to buy, but as a mass­produced object of fantasy
supporting and articulating the commodities on and around it. It is a
blank figure, inviting us, seducing us to both objectification and
identification as it casts a spell of desire, making all the promises for
the commodity. Its perfect, abstract, smooth plastic surface is
inhumanly flawless, its proportions fantastically graceful. This calls
out to us, suggesting that we might be transfigured toward this more
142 Banash

perfect state if only we owned the clothes adorning it. In sum, the
mannequin is our advertising ego­ideal, but somehow is also cut off
from us. Our fantasy of it, even when sadistic, remains unobtainable,
something we can exercise only if we buy what it sells; after all, one
isn’t allowed to purchase the mannequin from its store window.
Surrealists appropriate the mannequin as a readymade, incorporating
it into objects, assemblages, and installations that unmask commodity
come ons, creating critical advertising for the transformation of
everyday not through the purchase of a commodity, but as an act of
figuring the marvelous.
The mannequin dominated the International Exposition of
Surrealism in 1938. With both André Breton and Marcel Duchamp
participating, as well as Dalí and almost every other major Parisian
surrealist, the exhibition represented a kind of late, momentary
consensus, all the more remarkable in that each artist agreed to
prepare a female mannequin. As visitors to the exhibition entered,
they walked down a long corridor lined on either side with these
commercial readymades prepared by the artists, a fantastic running of
the gauntlet.26 In Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp,
Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, Lewis Kachur
explains that despite the hundreds of other surrealist paintings and
objects on display, it was the mannequins that made the greatest
impression on visitors and reviewers, and they were often reproduced
in newspaper photographs. Behind each mannequin is a street sign,
some actual places, others products of imagination. Placing each
under a street sign, it is as if fashionable window displays have
stepped out into the street. Kachur notes there is the suggestion of
prostitution, as visitors passed though the gloom, using Mazda
flashlights to investigate the particulars of each suddenly animated
streetwalker, encountering a birdcage replacing a head here, a tangle
of steel cable marking a cutting aura, or a body embedded with
spoons there. Interestingly, the mannequins were not for sale, and
 Critique 143

their overwhelming effect was an attempt at Breton’s hope of uniting

the real and the dream.
The surrealist appropriation of the ready­made icon of
fashionable consumption certainly exposes how advertising and
consumer culture work to incite desire and channel it into a purchase,
and it no doubt succeeds in cutting away the moment of purchase that
would mark a limit of that desire. And yet unlike the dada
appropriation of Nazi words and images that are unambiguously
critical and intolerable to the fascist state, the worlds of advertising
and fashion were untroubled by such surrealist practice. As Kachur
goes on to explain, “the success of the mannequins assured that they
would continue to appear in a variety of Surrealist forays in display ...
Dalí had mannequins both in the vitrines of Bonwit’s department store
and in a World’s Fair pavilion. Also in New York, Duchamp would
utilize a headless mannequin in the bookstore window display for
Breton’s Arcane 17” (67). Perhaps a large aspect of the surrealist
critique is caught up in the frame of the artwork, the exhibition space,
and ultimately other store windows. These borders do much to contain
whatever critical work their objects might do,27 in contrast to work
like Heartfield’s posters and collages, circulating widely over a
contested political ground. By and large, these two strategies of
critique and the readymade would animate the developments in
postwar ready­made art, with pop artists largely working with
similarly institutional and commercial boundaries to unmask both
advertising and the world of art with similarly fatal strategies that
culminate in the institutional theory of art, while more engaged
groups would attempt to pull art and critique out of the gallery and
back onto the streets.

The Practice of Critique

The critical force of collage is bound up with the ontology of its
materials. In seizing the very objects of a system, be it media
propaganda of fascism or the commodities of capitalism, the artist
144 Banash

could change what might have seemed a given, uncontestable reality.

While the artists would more often than not lose the political wars,
they could have semiotic victories. The critical use of ready­made
materials by Heartfield failed to stop the Nazis, and the surrealist
insistence on the marvelous did little to change the banality of
consumerism and arguably became the house style of advertising.
Though the critical force of ready­made materials has animated
almost every discussion of twentieth­century art and the use of the
readymade certainly changed definitions of art, I would like to focus
on a rather different element of critical practice and think of the force
of critique not simply as interpretive contest.28 Rather than thinking of
collage as only a contest of meaning, I would like to consider it as a
practice, an act that at least for the artists, and often as an inspiration
toward others, would allow some to act in an unprecedented world of
media.
To think of collage as a critical act is no longer to ask for
merely a semiotic reading of a work, to assess a given collage only in
terms of its success in disclosing a hidden connection or contesting an
ideology. Instead, it is to think about how artists related and reacted to
the vast ready­made culture of media and consumerism that defined
everyday life in the twentieth century. This too is perhaps the key
question of mass culture. In a world saturated with meaning that
constantly calls out with advertisements and entertainments,
everyone, as Guy Debord points out, becomes the object of this
constant media spectacle: “In all its specific manifestations–news or
propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of
entertainment–the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social
life. It is the omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in the
sphere of production, and the consummate result of that choice. In
form as in content the spectacle serves as total justification for the
conditions and aims of the existing system.”29 Debord’s devastating
formulation emphasizes that our wall­to­wall media does not ask for
invention or questions or even completion by its audience, but at most
 Critique 145

demands the confirming purchase. It is a hermetically sealed, total

discourse that reaffirms prevailing conditions in every respect, and it
is also monolithic and inescapable. In J. R. Eyerman’s photograph
for Life magazine, “3­D Movie Viewers during Opening Night
of Bwana Devil,” the audience is defined by the shocking sameness of
their faces in identical 3­D glasses, the monotones of black and white
contributing to the effect and underscoring their conformity and
passivity as mere spectators. The practice of collage in part resides in
its castrating prerogatives toward ready­made mass culture. Rather
than remaining the passive object of overwhelming images, the artist
takes up the scissors and cuts into this given world, rearranging it,
making new meanings from it, and refusing what Debord called its
“uninterrupted monologue of self­praise” (19). As a practice, collage
artists themselves transformed their own relationship to a ready­made
world, and though their works might not have had the same effect on
their audiences, or might have had limited audiences, or no audience
at all, these practices allowed the artists to become subjects in a media
culture, contesting and remaking meaning actively for themselves.
Debord maintains that the spectacle “has integrated itself into
reality to the same extent as it was describing it, and that it was
reconstructing it as it was describing it … The spectacle has spread
itself to the point where it now permeates all reality.”30 For Giorgio
Agamben, the real insight of Debord’s statement is the emphasis on
the power of the spectacle to replace reality31, and it resonates deeply
with Jean Baudrillard’s observation that media has in fact replaced
space, overwriting and ultimately liquidating the natural world itself.
Indeed, Baudrillard begins his great work, Simulacra and Simulation,
by retelling the Borges fable of a map made to the exact size of the
territory, and he then goes on to observe: “It is nevertheless the map
that precedes the territory … that engenders the territory, and if one
must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly
rot across the extent of the map.”32 It makes great sense that the two
great situationist artistic practices were the making of maps and
146 Banash

collages, and it is precisely the relationship of media spectacle to the

reality and the need of mapping a reality that speak to their
sensibilities.
In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Guy Debord and
the situationists developed the avant­garde provocation, but were
weary of the magic circle of art. For the situationists, surrealism failed
by becoming mere art, hustled off the streets and into galleries and
museums, and much of situationist theory would be devoted to
worries about their own members becoming mere artists. The hopes
of the situationists were fundamentally revolutionary, and they put the
emphasis on practice, even if those practices would be unnoticed by
audiences or utterly ephemeral. They hoped to provoke “situations,”
which really meant arranging or provoking encounters that demanded
engaged and thinking subjects because the effects and meanings of
the encounters would not be framed and managed within the approved
confines of consumer capitalism. As Debord put it in 1957: “The
construction of situations begins on the ruins of the modern spectacle.
It is easy to see to what extent the very principle of the
spectacle–nonintervention–is linked to the alienation of the old
world.” The key was breaking the spectacle’s total grip, and to “draw
him into activity by provoking his capacities to revolutionize his own
life.”33 For the situationists, there were two major ways to do this,
both deeply related to the critical gestures of collage. Writ large, the
group called for the dérive, its movements and effects taking place at
the level of the city, while writ small these same aims were similarly
at work in the practice of collage they named détournement.
The situationists defined the dérive as “a mode of
experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a
technique of transient passage through varied ambiances.”34
Interestingly, this activity of drifting without any practical end
through different neighborhoods could only take place in the densely
built and populated confines of a city. With Marx, they dismissed the
“idiocy of rural life,” and went so far as to mock a surrealist
 Critique 147

experiment in country walking, explaining: “Wandering in open

country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are
poorer there than anywhere else.”35 While one could justifiably
construe this as insular Parisian snobbery, there is perhaps a more
compelling reason for rejecting nature as a terrain of revolutionary
practice. Throughout situationist writings there is the odd paradox that
they insist on industrial and media modernity, celebrating the
potentials of automation to transform life and clinging to technologies
of all kinds, and yet they denounce the alienations produced by these
forces at every turn. Yet escaping back to nature was no answer, and
retreat to the country would make one simply irrelevant, unable to
contest or shape an emerging modernity that would undoubtedly
define life in a relentless future. Alone in nature, they felt the
necessary forces of chance, encounter, and intervention were absent,
leaving one unable to develop a revolutionary practice at all relevant
to a world in which the only reality is media spectacle. To rehearse the
pose of romantics wandering the countryside would be nostalgia for
an irrecoverable past, and they were certainly uninterested in the
insular drama of poets testing their souls and sensibilities against a
sublime landscape. The romantics saw in nature an expression of a
spiritual reality, but the situationists saw it merely as the unformed
and meaningless chaos of the untouched at best. Or, even more likely,
the situationist also saw nature itself as overwritten by the spectacle,
as Debord puts it, “there remains nothing, in culture or in nature,
which has not been transformed, and polluted, according to the means
and interests of modern industry” (Comments 10). Situationist
practice was conceived on the terrain of city­spectacle; that is, on the
ground of the readymade. If we were to playfully suggest that
Eyerman’s photo functions as an allegory of the cave for the society
of the spectacle, the situationists hoped to get out of their seats, tear
off the glasses, seize the projection booth, and cut up the film.
Of course Eyerman’s photo could serve only as an allegory,
for the situationists were witnessing in postwar Paris a complete
148 Banash

rewriting of the city that would seek to rationalize and control–in

short, to spectacularize–every aspect of life on the streets.36 The needs
of capital and political control sought to make urban life predictable
and controllable, and the space of the city was continually refined to
facilitate the circulation of cars and commodities. Thomas
McDonough points out that “by the middle 1950s postwar consumer
culture was making its visual mark in Paris as large numbers of shops
and cafés modernized their fronts; older buildings began the process
of restoration know as the ravalement des façades … Paris was
gradually becoming the urban museum we know today.”37
Additionally, networks of freeways and huge projects of gentrification
were demolishing houses and neighborhoods. Just at the moment the
city was remaking itself as the mirror of capitalism and media, the
situationists called for abandoning work and drifting through the city
with no other purpose than pleasure, adventure, and perhaps mischief.
There is a distinctly juvenile delinquent tone to this, as they call for
streetlights that pedestrians can turn off, the exploration of abandoned
buildings, and the use of fire escapes to stroll the rooftops.
More seriously, as they moved through the city, they noted its
“psychogeographic” emotional tenor, and then produced gorgeous
collaged maps, such as Asger Jorn’s and Debord’s The Naked City.
Cutting into commercial maps, rearranging the fragments, they
reclaimed this space as their territory, to be arranged for the
cultivation of self and pleasure, and not simply a complex of capital.
In essence, they hoped to radicalize themselves by wandering against
the grain of rationalization, and in their collage maps, the city
becomes malleable, something they can reinvent by cutting into it.
The practice of drifting and the collage maps that record and mirror
the practice both radically cut into “the role of the spectacle to project
an image of unification and homogenization over urban space”
(McDonough 57). Remarkably, the situationists suggest that space
and media are the same, and to affect one is to affect the other.
 Critique 149

In their collage manifesto, “Methods of Détournement,”

Debord and Gil Wolman explore the effects of readymade materials in
collages, but they do not neglect to connect this practice to the dérive:
“If détournement were extended to urbanistic realizations, not many
people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city
of an entire neighborhood of another. Life can never be too
disorienting: détournement on this level would really make it
beautiful.”38 It is striking how the two key practices of situationists,
collage and drifting, are completely interchangeable. One can drift
through the media, remapping it and using it for new purposes, just as
one would ultimately aspire to cut into the very life of the city to
wrest it from commercial interests. Though of course unable to
practice détournement at this level, this very disorientation was the
mode of the dérive and détournement. McDonough observes: “The
dérive as a technique du dépaysement created moments of disruption
in everyday life … in which the apparent homogeneity of the
spectacle city was fractured to reveal the richness of possibilities
offered by movement” (63). Unable to détourn entire cites, the
situationists turned to the media that increasingly constituted it
anyway, calling for radical collages that would reanimate the entire
culture: “The first visible consequences of a widespread use of
détournement, apart from its intrinsic propaganda powers, will be the
revival of a multitude of bad books, and thus the extensive
(unintended) participation of their unknown authors; an increasingly
extensive transformation of sentences or plastic works that happen to
be in fashion” (Debord and Wolman 11). Both drifting and collage
make the passive object of the spectacle into an unruly subject
practicing self­invention.
This kind of individual practice has gone under many names,
from the cut­ups of Burroughs and Acker to punk and later DIY (do­
it­yourself). Indeed, making cut­up novels, collages, films, or music
often for small subcultural audiences, or no audience at all, was rarely
spark for a mass movement. Such a critique largely misses the real
150 Banash

nature of such practices, which did not begin as attempts for political
organization. Reading the accounts of collage artists, it becomes clear
that such practices often begin a mode of reflection, survival, and
understanding, often taken up during their youth as the only response
they can find to the society of the spectacle. Later, most of these
artists would also be politically radicalized, but in a spectacular world
constantly seeking to make everyone an object. Taking up scissors is
first an act of individual self­defense, allowing one to both understand
the forces organizing the life of the culture, and through scissors and
paste to rethink it, to drift, to rearrange, to change the given
psychogeography at first for oneself and perhaps later for a
movement.
To think of the media spectacle not merely as so many
entertainments or advertisements, but also as psychogeographies,
spaces with specific affects, particular points of access or egress,
forces us to think about mapping an understanding of ourselves, and
this theme recurs often for postmodern collage artists. Kathy Acker’s
punk collage novels are visceral and challenging cut­ups of both
literary history and contemporary media, but in her explanations of
this work, she often begins with her own fascination with the
narratives, characters, and figures she found around her, but also with
her inability to reconcile these conflicting images. In one interview,
she suggests powerfully how her cut­ups began as a part of her
earliest experiences as a reader, their thematics, and her own desire to
find some way to make a life practice in the world: “The first books I
ever read came from my mother’s collection. My mother had porn
books and Agatha Christie, so when I was six years old, I’d hide the
porn books between the covers of Agatha Christie. They are my
favorite models, the books I read as a kid. That’s why I originally
became a writer–to write Agatha Christie­type books, but my mind is
fucked up.”39 In part, Acker says in a number of essays and interviews
that she couldn’t find within herself the authoritative voice celebrated
by critics and nurtured by creative writing programs. Instead, she
 Critique 151

wanted to find practices to manipulate texts. In Hannibal Lecter, My

Father, Acker explains her initial struggles with identity in art:
“Charles Olson said that when you write what you have to do is find
your own voice, but it all seemed to be very big, almost God­like, and
I found this very confusing. I couldn’t find my own voice, I didn’t
know what my own voice was. And I’m sure that’s where I started to
write in different voices and started to deal with schizophrenia. This
was behind it, was in a way a fight against the fathers, because they
were very much my fathers.”40 Instead of looking inside, Acker began
to drift through what she was reading and seeing, cutting in her
experiences in a psychogeographic map of the spectacle that disclosed
particularly the gender politics that went unremarked or uncontested.
Acker published her first book as a fictionalized autobiography, The
Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula, and in it
she ironizes the idea of autobiography and disrupts authorship with
the use of ready­made fragments from both the biographies of
Victorian murderesses and fragments taken from the pages of True
Confessions magazine.
Acker used collage extensively in her early novels, taking
significant amounts of material from contemporary pulp novels,
magazines, and canonical works. Like Burroughs before her, Acker
articulated her project in terms of both objective critique and
subjective reinvention. In her essay “Dead Doll Humility,” she
explains the role of critique in plagiarizing pulp magazines and the
importance of taking the fragments as readymades: “To copy down, to
appropriate, to deconstruct other texts is to break down those
perceptual habits the culture doesn’t want to be broken.”41
Acker describes her collages as a process of self­invention. In
the same essay, Acker also states that her use of collage was part of a
“[d]ecision not to find this own voice but to use and be other,
multiple, even innumerable, voices.” Almost anything that Acker
happened to see or read could find its way into her work. She would
summarize the plots of films she saw on TV, rehearse and
152 Banash

simultaneously revise the plots of Shakespeare’s plays or William

Gibson’s novels. Almost all of these techniques are deployed in her
second novel, The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse
Lautrec.
The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec makes a pastiche of
historical fact and fictive imagination, jumping through time and
genre, from nineteenth­century Paris to contemporary New York,
historical biography to soft­core pornography and genre­fiction. The
novel begins with the story of Toulouse as a sex­obsessed, deformed
woman, living in a Montmartre brothel in the late nineteenth century.
A murder plot develops, which largely consists of cut­ups of Agatha
Christie’s Halloween Party. Van Gogh’s daughter is actually Janis
Joplin, who becomes the lover of James Dean. A complete summary
of Rebel Without a Cause, including lengthy quotations from the
screenplay, is presented in the midst of a long series of cut­ups that
profile Henry Kissinger. The final section explains America’s decline
into “friendly fascism,” dramatized through cut­ups of non­fiction
accounts of CIA plots and readymades taken from gangster films. Her
Burroughsian analysis thus demonstrates that the CIA and the mob are
interchangeable institutions of repression and social control. The
entire novel constantly plays with identity, as Toulouse Lautrec both
is and is not the historical artist, and the actors in Rebel Without a
Cause are and are not their fictional characters.
This novel helped to establish Acker as a formidable
postmodern writer, and over ten years after its publication it
occasioned one of Acker’s most notable encounters with the
establishment. In Toulouse Lautrec, Acker included one of her early
collage works, “the true story of a rich woman: i want to be raped
every night!” Acker appropriated over two thousand words of this
piece, almost verbatim, from The Pirate by Harold Robbins, the very
sort of “pornography” she hid behind the covers of mystery novels as
a child.42 The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec collages a vast amount of
material from the mass media, from books and films to music and
 Critique 153

biography. What Acker clearly recognizes is that such materials are

the very stuff out of which people construct the meaning of their
everyday lives, but she transforms the act of consumption into one of
production. However, unlike the shared mythologies or folk cultures
of the past, these materials are now “owned” as commodities by their
so­called authors. Acker explains: “The writer took a certain amount
of language, verbal material, forced that language to stop radiating in
multiple, even unnumerable directions, to radiate in only one
direction so there could be his meaning. The writer’s voice wasn’t
exactly this meaning. The writer’s voice was a process, how he had
forced the language to obey him, his will. The writer’s voice is the
voice of the writer­as­God.” However, like a situationist on a dérive,
Acker is engaged in something very different: “Decided that since
what she wanted to do was just to write, not to find her own voice,
could and would write by using anyone’s voice, anyone’s text,
whatever materials she wanted to use.”
Like the material from pulp magazines such as True
Confessions, Robbins’s work represents acceptable establishment
pornography. Pirate itself is a lurid work of soft­core porn and
improbable politics. The “pirate” is an anti­Semitic, Lebanese oil
sheik who, unbeknownst to himself, is actually a Jew. He marries an
American WASP (purportedly a sketch of Jacqueline Onassis), and
fathers a daughter. She grows up to be a PLO terrorist who plots to
destroy her own father’s oil fields. In the section that Acker
appropriates, Jordana is in the south of France. She picks up a
younger black man at a disco and he takes her back to his room. In a
scene of light S&M, he forces Jordana to snort cocaine as they engage
in sex. Acker includes this scene as a readymade, and almost in its
entirety, making only a few changes. Unlike Burroughs’s cut­up
method, Acker tends to present large sections of ready­made material,
sometimes changing names or adding scenes, but more often leaving
the readymade more or less intact. What gives her use of collage its
power is the new context in which the fragment is presented. In this
154 Banash

particular case, the story is told by Toulouse as a “bedtime” story.

Toulouse prefaces her recounting of the tale by joking with her
companions: “If you’re nice to me and send me presents, especially
money so I can get this trash printed … I’ll tell you another story.”43
This is certainly a comment on the relationship between her own
work and Robbins’s novels. Like Robbins, she knows that the tale is
lurid entertainment, and she asks her listeners to pay for it. However,
while Robbins makes millions from his pornography, Acker initially
had to find the money to print her own books.
What makes Acker’s pornography different from Robbins’s,
despite the fact that she uses the same text, is the new context in
which she presents it. Robbins’s novel is a slick, narrative fantasy of
wealth and privilege. Jordana’s life of wealth, leisure, and debauchery
is presented as a pleasant fantasy. Acker transforms this blithe sexual
fantasy. She begins by giving her readymade a new title: “the true
story of a rich woman: i want to be raped every night!” With this title,
Acker asks her reader to consider the politics behind the S&M scene,
which may now be read as a man’s dramatization of female desire as
the internalization of patriarchal ideology. Acker also changes the
scene from the French Riviera to Times Square, and renames the
character Jacqueline Onassis, making explicit Robbins’s roman­à­clef.
Yet the racism coordinating the scene (the characters call each other
“white bitch” and “nigger”) is Robbins’s, not Acker’s, invention. The
politics behind this pulp fantasy thus become apparent. However, this
is not to say that Acker simply dislikes Pirate, or that she takes a
simplistic position of critique. As she maintains in “Dead Doll
Humility,” appropriating materials such as Pirate from her own life as
a reader is a way of identifying the languages that inform her own
identity: “Thought just after had finished writing this, here is a
conventional novel. Perhaps, here is ‘my voice’. Now I’ll never again
have to make up a bourgeois novel” (84).
Acker recognizes her own voice in Robbins’s novel, and this
is where her work as a collage artist moves beyond objective critique
 Critique 155

and toward an investigation and transformation of identity. In The

Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, the same kinds of texts that Acker read
as a child, that in part constructed her world and that of her mother,
are literally present, one inside the other. The literary equivalent of
her own covert reading as a child is made explicit as Agatha Christie
and Harold Robbins are joined together in the narrative.
Acker considered her first three books, The Childlike Life of
the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula, I Dreamt I Was A
Nymphomaniac, and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec as a trilogy
about the dissolution of her own identity through an investigation of
the voices that informed both her own identity and the culture at
large: “When one first encounters the “I” in Tarantula, it’s the
autobiographical “I.” Then the “I” takes on other, non­
autobiographical qualities and gradually the invisible parentheses
around the “I” dissolve and the experiment in identity proceeds from
that” (“A Conversation” 15). By destabilizing these boundaries, Acker
was able to practice on the very materials that were interpolating her
from her earliest experiences. She has the courage and the will to take
up the scissors, to make a new map of these images and languages
that construct the culture, and to use them as a means of escape and
critique, making for herself a very different psychogeography. In her
essays and interviews, it is striking how Acker consistently brings
together traveling through spaces and text: “The difference between
me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a
child I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now I know, as much
as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So
it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or,
by dream.”44 Acker’s critique of literature and her desire to find
wonder mirror the very terms of the dérive and détournement
articulated by the situationists. In an interview with Sylvère Lotringer,
Acker maintains: “What I have always hated about the bourgeois
story is that it closes down. I don’t use the bourgeois story­line
because the real content of that novel is the property structure of
156 Banash

reality. It’s about ownership. That isn’t my world­reality. My world

isn’t about ownership. In my world people don’t even remember their
names” (23). Like the city, ever more rationalized for the needs of
capital at the expense of invention and everyday life, Acker finds the
novel a space of rigid identity structured by the needs of control, and
she contrasts this to earlier mythic literature: “And I like that
landscape much better. You’re allowed to just move, you’re allowed
to wander. It’s like traveling. I’ve always envied men this and I can
never travel being a woman. I always wanted to be a sailor, that’s
really what I love” (23). As a psychogeographer, Acker created
powerful maps of her own drift across canonical and popular
literature and media, using scissors to sever ownership, to reveal
hidden connections, and to craft a practice by which she could live in
the world. Perhaps it isn’t so strange that toward the end of her life
she became a body builder–because for her, writing by cutting,
copying, plagiarizing was never just about the final object, the
property rights of the book, but about a physical journey in the
dépaysement of wonder. In the end, Acker made herself into the
pirates she dreamed of as a child: “I am no longer a child and I still
want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in
wonder” (Bodies 159).
Acker’s experience, experiments, and profoundly feminist
practices are recognizable in the work of Manchester punk, Linder.
Born in Northern England, Linder Sterling graduated from
Manchester Polytechnic, trained in commercial graphic design, a
trade she would never practice in any conventional sense. Instead, at
the age of 18, she aspired to follow in the steps of the dadas. “I edited
myself down to one name, Linder. I still have my sketch book from
1977, and there I describe myself–with youthful certainty–as a
“monteur.” My thought was to follow faithfully in the footsteps of
George Grosz, John Heartfield, et al, who renounced the title of artists
and preferred to describe themselves as assemblers and engineers.”45
In many respects, her youthful certainty was justified, though her
 Critique 157

Linder, cover detail from Pretty Girl No. 1, 1977. Stuart Shave /
Modern Art. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
158 Banash

career would not be a response to the overtly organized fascism of

Nazism with clearly drawn battle lines, but the more intimate and
confused, if no less fascist, terrain of family, gender, capital, and
power. Diving into the emerging punk subculture of Manchester,
Linder created powerful visual collages for fliers, fanzines, album
covers, and her own extensive collages. Her work thus found an
audience, and she herself became a performer, fronting the band
Ludus. Throughout her career, she made brutal and disturbing
collages that link gender and consumerism, disclosing the repressed
connections that fuel consumption and advertising. Like Kathy Acker,
Linder’s cut­ups came through her own questions and confusions
faced with the demands and contradictions of normativity. Just as
Acker brought together the respectable domesticated mystery and
soft­porn mainstream novels, so Linder wanted to explore and drift
across terrain with carefully policed boundaries and rules. In an
interview describing the origins of her iconic commodity­bodies, she
observes “It was like doing a peculiar jigsaw puzzle. I had two piles
of magazines–trashy men’s stuff and trashy women’s. I noticed that in
both women were high profile. Men’s magazines were filled with
pictures of women. And the invisible man was present by his absence.
I was fascinated by the fact that I as a woman was supposed to be in
all these worlds, I was represented in two separate male/female views
of the world. These montages became an explicit diary of my feelings
at that time.”46 Making these collages as a young woman, Linder was
using scissors and paste to cut through the culture, to make a practice
that would allow her to remap the psychogeography of the spectacle.
In her series Pretty Girl No. 1, she takes a soft­core men’s magazine
featuring black and white shots of a rather ordinary woman striking
nude poses next to the luxuries of a middle­class home: the bar, the
wall­to­wall carpet, the up­to­date furniture, the stereo. The most
striking thing about this source material is its utter banality. Rather
than some ornate, overwrought fantasy, this is the pornography of the
norm. Linder has collaged each of the 24 shots, always replacing the
 Critique 159

A page from Linder's Pretty Girl No. 1. Stuart Shave / Modern Art.
Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
160 Banash

young woman’s head with an oversized domestic object ripped from

an advertisement: an electric kettle, an iron, a clock, a television, a
stove, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine. The replacements are
shocking, in part because the object always manages to seem
animated, suggesting the angle of a head to match the posture of the
body. Since the objects are mostly in color, they stand out against the
black and white, drawing the eye, all but vibrating. Attached to the
naked woman, the strategy of advertisers to make their commodities
female sexual objects is clearly laid bare. Ads do conjure the naked
willing woman, but they also repress her actual appearance. Linder
has made that body visible. Yet almost all the objects here are those of
the domestic environment of women’s work: the stove, the teapot, the
sewing machine, and so a woman is these objects, at least in the eyes
of advertisers. She is not only the object of male desire, but she is also
told to inhabit and desire this world herself. The perspectives of men’s
pornography and women’s lifestyle magazines seem antithetical, but
her collages powerfully disclose the visceral connections, the
seamless logic.
In montages made for The Secret Public, Linder often took
the bodies of more typically fantastic pornographic bodies, replacing
their heads with outsized cakes or tarts. The effect is similarly
shocking, but also slightly different, in that the women are clearly
seen as objects to be consumed, sexuality reduced to sadistic orality,
all the more so when the occasional man to appear in these montages
is equipped with a vagina dentata mouth, seemingly to devour the
woman’s confectionary head. Again, repressed logics are disclosed.
The lifestyle magazines encourage the woman to master the domestic
arts of cooking and baking, but there is something insidious in this as
her accomplishments are part of her very objectification in both life
and advertising. Moreover, the consumption of women’s images in
pornography is mapped onto the most literal consumption imaginable,
making evident a horrifying and all consuming gaze. Producing these
collages, Linder was no longer the passive subject of the spectacle,
 Critique 161

Linder, Untitled, 1977. Stuart Shave / Modern Art. Reproduced

courtesy of the artist.
162 Banash

but instead a maker of questions and answers, working out for herself
the demands of femininity and evading them with her castrating
scissors. Like Acker, she took the ready­made materials that modeled
normative desire, laying bare both their logic and their horror.
Perhaps the most striking visual element in Linder’s work is
the face. The seat of intelligence and emotion is often, as in Pretty
Girl No. 1, replaced with an object. In this strategy, the subject is
reduced to both desire for the object and is also made into just an
object. In other collages, however, Linder uses the powerful shifts in
scale to render the norm horrifying. She makes the face grotesque by
simply amplifying the expectations of the norm itself. In one of a
series of black­and­white self­portraits, the youthful Linder stares out
over the corner of her eye, but her mouth is overdrawn with lipstick,
smeared onto her face and teeth. James R. Currie observes that messy
lipstick is a sign of madness: “It’s not strictly speaking that the
lipstick is messy that is the point; it’s rather that the lipstick and the
lips are not aligned to form the conventional symbiosis–i.e., whereby
the lips and their artificial color blend into one. As a result, the
lipstick looks like it has an autonomy of its own, as if before we see it
it had been crawling slowly around.”47 Currie points out the inversion
of subject and object, as the lipstick takes on a horrifying life of its
own, as if the norm were colonizing and overwriting the face, making
the person a mere object of its own force. The gesture of gender
normativity, being well made­up, is thus amplified to the pitch of a
hysterical enthusiasm that negates the subject. The same effect is
rendered through the use of collage in Red Dress, a series of
photomontages. Many feature Linder’s face in black­and­white close
up, but full­color advertising mouths with glossy lipstick and white
teeth are placed over her. The effect is similar, and even more
powerful, as the mouth should signal normative desires, but is clearly
an image pasted over, leaving Linder unable to speak, attempting to
embody a terrifying ideal. The frisson between the glossy mouth and
the grainy head is intense, and it shows the artist’s struggle with
 Critique 163

Linder, Untitled, 1977. Stuart Shave / Modern Art. Reproduced

courtesy of the artist.
164 Banash

normativity. Linder thus collaged not only what she found in the
media, but also her own images. Yet these glossy mouths function
much like the lipstick itself. Most of these collages depend heavily on
the mouth being oversized, gigantic on the face, and always slightly
askew. As Currie observes: “The effect of the misalignment is to
emphasize the quality of death. For the dead of course are always
pathetically unaware of what’s being done to them. Madness and
death–there’s a lot going on with lipstick.”
Like Acker, Linder’s practices allow her to understand the
forces and desires constituting normative sexuality but which the
spectacle depends on, profits from, and yet always subtlety represses.
Through her collages, she became a subject in the very act of
representing herself as an image of normative madness, but her
comments show what a struggle this was. It would be a mistake to
think of artists like Linder as cold analysts uninvested and
unsympathetic with their material. In this, I think, her work is far
different than that of Heartfield, and perhaps closer to Grosz, who
always represented the human grotesque in which he seemed
implicated. Like Grosz, then, she writes about her practices with
pornography in particular: “This was as much a political act as driven
by my curiosity. Pornography had its own debased codes, and my
intention was to understand them. Not to ‘borrow’ them, and never to
collude with them. But to understand them seemed and seems,
important” (27). This self­understanding was hardly uncomplicated or
even easy. About the role of faces in her work, she remarks: “I had
always hidden the facial identity of the women in most of my
photomontage series, and so I determinedly obscured my own identity
when initially faced with a camera. My mother once said, ‘we were
too poor to be photographed,’ and there began my life’s fascination
with the medium” (28). Here Linder reveals her identification with
the women represented in the spectacle, and her profound sympathy
with them and her desire to create images that would never take part
in their exploitation even as it would critique and disclose its code.
 Critique 165

She also remarks on the role of class in the face of consumer culture,
and the horror of never being able to meet the demand of the
spectacle’s image. Linder’s work is thus a profound
psychogeographical map of the contradictions animating the culture.
Linder was trained as a graphic artist in the techniques and
aesthetics of layout, presumably to find work as a technician of the
spectacle herself, and one can readily imagine that she might well
have found a job doing the complex cut­and­paste layout work that
created the very lifestyle magazines she cut up. The irony is the
images of the spectacle are themselves discordant collages of
elements, jostling one another on pages, on newsstands, the flicker of
changing channels. It would seem that collage is the very mode of the
world in which we live. And yet, critical work by artists like
Heartfield and Linder tends to reveal connections, fractures, and
create frissons not readily visible in the culture itself, for although the
culture functions through the practice and logic of collage, it goes to
great lengths to frame, harmonize, and narrate its elements in what
Debord called an uninterrupted monologue of self­praise. The critical
practice of collage is often one of opening the sutures, revealing the
seams and hidden contexts, contents, and connections eclipsed by the
ideological work of framing. This role of framing explains why
collage itself is no critical guarantee, and how it is vital to observe the
ways in which the material of the spectacle is presented, with imposed
boundaries in genre, for instance, between the men’s and women’s
material at the heart of Linder’s critical work.

Collage and Ideological Frames

Lately, it has become fashionable to say that all collage has the
disturbing and critical power of the kinds of collages I’ve been
reading here in the critical tradition, but all too often the culture uses
collage in the service of something much more like the reservistenbild
that I discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In truth, without
careful frames, harmonies, rhythms, or narratives, collages are
166 Banash

profoundly demanding and disturbing, and the technicians of the

spectacle know this, and at every turn try to provide them. Thus, for
instance, while collage metaphors are key to the experiences and
characters of many contemporary novels, none of those novels is
itself a collage.48 That novelists do not perform the practices of
collage that are such central metaphors to their work makes a great
deal of sense. There are relatively few collage novels to begin with,
and those by William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, or more recently
Raymond Federman and other experimentalists are quite illegible to
the uninitiated. However, artists working in visual or aural media
don’t face quite the same barrier, and thus it is far more typical to find
montages of ready­made images in films and television programming
or sampling of all sorts in popular music. While novels invoke collage
metaphors to reflect on the process of consumption and identity,
visual and aural collages seem to more emphatically address the very
nature of a mediascape that keeps us constantly surfing through a
cascade of sounds and images. In a 1966 interview by Conrad
Knickerbocker, William Burroughs connects the cut­up forms of
collage to the experience of everyday life, “because cut­ups make
explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway.
Somebody is reading a newspaper ... [b]ut subliminally he is reading
the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to
him. That’s a cut­up.”49 For Burroughs, simply walking down the
street was to be assaulted by a constant influx of images, “a
juxtaposition of what’s happening outside and what you’re thinking
of” (5). For Burroughs, the cut­up was a way to present this, but it
cuts against the idea of art as shaping the external chaos of the world
into meaningful form. As Jean­Paul Sartre maintains in What is
Literature?: “If I fix on canvas or in writing a certain aspect of the
fields or the sea or a look on someone’s face which I have disclosed, I
am conscious of having produced them by condensing relationships,
by introducing order where there was none, by imposing the unity of
mind on the diversity of things.”50 Burroughs eschews this formal
 Critique 167

desire, suggesting in part that one power of collage is to provide an

almost unmediated version of the raw experience of perception in a
mediascape without the forms of art that condense, order, and unify.
Indeed, in cuts and collages, the things themselves often remain in an
undecidable chaos, demanding of the audience something much like
the work of the artist, for the art represents exactly the chaos of the
mediated world. While Burroughs offers a utopian vision, his
experiment suggests that the images, sounds, and inchoate
mediascape is caught up with our own perception, and it is how we
make meaning: “I’ll say, when I got to here I was at that sign; I was
thinking this, and when I return to the house I’ll type these up” (4).
Thus the commercial sign, the walk, and the thought are cut­up
together. There are two problems with this. Formally, we have
traditionally called on artists to filter and form the chaos of perception
for us. While we have a sense of it as the condition of our lives, we
long for the simplifications and intensifications that narratives,
melodies, perspectives, or frames bring to simplify and intensify it in
a comprehensible meaning. More troubling, since almost every color,
note, and letter of our media is now owned outright, the meanings we
make in our cut­up perceptions are no longer our own. I want to offer
two examples that demonstrate both of these related points:
“Revolution 9” on the Beatles’s (The White Album) and DJ Danger
Mouse’s The Grey Album.51
Working just after the convulsions of 1968, the Beatles
produced The White Album, perhaps their most difficult work, and
certainly the one that provoked the greatest interpretive frenzy. The
Manson Family poured over every nuance of the album, thinking it a
guide to apocalypse, while many leftist critics denounced its obscurity
and counterrevolutionary tendencies. The album’s penultimate song,
“Revolution 9” is both the longest studio track the band ever released
and the one that has provoked the most outrage from fans. The track
itself is a true collage, relying on the tape technologies pioneered by
avant­garde experimentalists of musique concrète like Karlheinz
168 Banash

Stockhausen and Jean Barraqué. It contains samples of orchestral

tunings and chords, Beethoven and Sibelius, snippets of conversation
by the Beatles and others, vocals, noises of traffic, machines, football
chants and other crowd screams, and of course, snatches of pop
crooning and radio static. These effects were looped on tapes and then
mixed together. The whole is densely layered and much remains
indecipherable to even the most devoted listener. It is quite simply a
disturbing collage, difficult to listen to, and it is unclear how one
should listen to it; some devoted fans delight in playing it backwards
and searching for hidden messages. Though there are definite rhythms
in the churning textures of the sounds, they aren’t the grooves of pop,
and one can’t be lulled by such disturbance and chaos.
“Revolution 9” is not the first time that the Beatles turned to
sampling techniques. The White Album is stitched together with such
moments in the breaks between songs, and on other albums they had
experimented with tape loops, running tapes in reverse, and other
avant­garde techniques. However, in these earlier moments, the use of
such aural collage and experimentation was subordinated to lyric,
melody, and rhythm. On “Revolution 9,” the cut­up performs the
chaos of perception, and the organizing structures of melody, rhythm,
and lyric don’t fully or forcefully contain the chaos: it is a true cut­up
in Burroughs’s sense. This invocation of a mediascape of confused
and relentless perception (thus the static, crowds, sports, and music
samples) that is “Revolution 9” violates the pleasures of pop. Though
cut­up and collage are much the makeup of our mediascape and our
perception, popular audiences find little pleasure in the most direct
and radical manifestations of it, preferring invocations that gesture
toward it as well­framed and contained metaphors or synecdoche. In a
performatively apt collage of his own, critic Devin McKinney writes
that “Revolution 9” is like “Randall Jarrell’s famous comment on
Whitman: ‘There is in him almost everything in the world, so that one
responds to him, willingly or unwillingly, almost as one does to the
world.’”52 But of course art, and popular art in particular, is just what
 Critique 169

we turn to in order to make sense of an overwhelming world, to

simplify it, intensify it, organize it, or tranquilize it, and “Revolution
9” intensifies without organizing, throwing us back into the very
confusion popular audiences long to escape.
Whatever the merits or meanings of the Beatles’s forray into
musique concrète, it is worth noting that they had total freedom to do
it. To this day, no one has untangled all the samples that make up the
song, and the Beatles were never called upon to account for their
sources, nor were they sued for violations of copyright. The
readymades of The White Album were simply the sounds of the world,
the ready­made materials of art in a mediated age. If Sartre following
Heidegger provides examples of a face, a landscape, or the sea as the
subject or art, those subjects must now include not only the raw but
the cooked as well: the very sea of ready­made commodities in which
we live.
Literal and radical collages of sound are some of the most
frequently popular forms of collage that people encounter, and in
particular, hip­hop has made audio collage the most important popular
form of the past thirty years. Though there are many reasons for this, I
want to highlight two aspects of this fascinating development. Many
critics have pointed out the power of popular music to inform our
affects and identity. Indeed, Fredric Jameson writes quite movingly
about this new status of music in our culture: “The passionate
attachment one can form to this or that pop single, the rich personal
investment of all kinds of private associations and existential
symbolism which is the feature of such attachment, are fully as much
a function of our own familiarity as of the work itself: the pop single,
by means of repetition, insensibly becomes part of the existential
fabric of our own lives, so that what we listen to is ourselves, our own
previous auditions.”53 This invokes both the perceptual “mosaic” and
cool style of McLuhan and the problems of commodity fetishism. We
swim through a culture of sounds, taking them in insensibly, coolly,
and they are thus woven into our experience and our identity quite
170 Banash

irresistibly. One of the most radical moves of hip­hop is taking the

technologies of mass reproduction and turning them back on these
sounds, using the turntable to simultaneously reproduce and produce
at once. Thus, we can turn to our previous auditions as the productive
force for new sounds, meanings, emotions, or identity–at least until
we are confronted by the limits of the commodity, and then we find
that in listening to ourselves we are owned.
DJ Danger Mouse confronts both of these truths, taking the
cultural icon–The White Album–a ubiquitous artifact bound up for
millions of fans and casual listeners alike with intense cultural
associations and profound personal resonances. Mixing new music
from the Beatles album, Danger Mouse adds the vocal tracks of
superstar rapper Jay­Z’s The Black Album with them to produce The
Grey Album. Unlike the densely layered sampling of earlier hip­hop
like that of Terminator X or The Dust Brothers, Danger Mouse
emphatically uses relatively little from The White Album. On most
tracks, he crafts decidedly melodic and heavily rhythmic hooks that
move to a funky but relentless beat, using usually two or three iconic
samples from the Beatles album. The strategy is the very opposite of
the maximalist “Revolution 9,” even though that song is itself
sampled, for rather than presenting the chaos of the world, Danger
Mouse simplifies, intensifies, and unifies the much larger and more
varied sonic pallet of The White Album. The unity of The Grey Album
as a complete work is even more complete because Jay­Z’s signature
flow holds all the tracks together narratively as well. Though the
album is certainly an audio collage, it is remarkably unified and
intense, offering the pleasures of the popular, the potential
disturbances and dissonances of collage framed and organized by
rhythm and narrative. In this, the most popular forms of sampling are
not unlike the deployment of collage in popular novels, invoking the
complexities of the mediascape and the commodity, but carefully
framing and unifying, controlling and limiting the most radical,
 Critique 171

castrating, anarchic potentials of the technique that would interrupt

the pleasures of the audience.
Though popular collages like The Grey Album are profoundly
enjoyable for just this reason, it is shocking in quite another way. It
simply seizes both Jay­Z and the Beatles as readymades to be newly
worked over, transformed, changed, not just consumed, but
reproduced. However, thirty years after “Revolution 9,” copyright law
has caught up with consumption, throttling the impulse to creatively
reinvent new, unforeseen, or moreover unauthorized meanings with
corporate­controlled readymades. So while the corporations that profit
and promote and advertise the construction of meaning through
lifestyle shopping, more and more they also seek to control just what
those lifestyles might look like and sound like and, ultimately, mean.
As McLeod explains in Freedom of Expression, “[T]he Grey Album
was yet another example of a creative work that literally had no place
in this world; it was stillborn legally, even if it’s very much alive
creatively.”54 In the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter
Benjamin suggests that often critique and hope for transformation is
found in memory that “flashes up at a moment of danger.”55 Perhaps
the freedom the Beatles took for granted to create “Revolution 9” is
such a memory, coming to us through The Grey Album, the slick pop
production reminding us just what is at stake in the commodification
of music and other intellectual property that would take away any
real, tangible possibilities of entertaining and truly valuing our
profound and cool relationship to pop culture.
 NOSTALGIA: COLLAGE, COLLECTING
AND THE PASTE

Avant­garde traditions emphasize the critical moment of collage:

cutting. As we have seen, artists–from dada to the situationists and
punk subcultures–cut up the objects of consumer capitalism,
shattering established orders and ideas, producing a critique of
ideology and desire in radical and disturbing collages and
assemblages. Their works emphasize the seams of collage and
celebrate the fragments. But collage still has two moments: cutting
and pasting, and the desire to gather together, to paste, to make a new
whole is sometimes a utopian gesture, but one that is almost always
profoundly nostalgic. Like the kabbalah myth of the breaking of the
vessels, it is the hope that those fragments could be redeemed, the
flood of words, images, and objects that make up our chaotic modern
lives could be put together and made whole–that our fragmented
selves might also be made whole. Artists Joseph Cornell and Andy
Warhol, filmmaker Craig Baldwin, performers the Tape­Beatles,
collector William Davies King, and writers like Walter Benjamin and
Don DeLillo emphasize these moments of gathering. This desire to
order and conserve objects, maintains Jean Baudrillard, “is the
discourse of subjectivity itself, and objects are a privileged register of
that discourse.”1 If we should doubt Baudrillard’s point, we need only
open a magazine or walk into a mall, where every object cries out to
us that it might bring happiness and wholeness. While few would
consciously admit to believing such slick and impossible come ons,
this is one of the most powerful forces animating everyday life in
174 Banash

consumer culture. To understand its dynamics clearly in both art and

everyday life, I want to first turn to that most modern American
character, Citizen Kane.

The Collector as Kane

Directed by Orson Welles for RKO, the 1941 classic follows the rise
and fall of Charles Foster Kane, a composite tycoon based loosely on
William Randolph Hearst, Harold Fowler McCormick, and Welles
himself. Beginning as a rich, idealistic young heir, the narcissist Kane
loses all his connections with people and is left only to relate to his
obsession with objects.
“Rosebud” is both a word and a thing. As Kane’s dying word,
it is perhaps the most famous one­liner in American film; the failed
journalistic quest to uncover its mysterious reference is the frame­tale
for the whole picture. By the end of the film, only the audience
realizes that Rosebud is the name of a small sled, a sentimental
childhood plaything, and Kane’s only connection to a world of
maternal love and seeming innocence. Critics have constantly derided
this device as somewhat ham­handed, and Peter Bogdanovich reports
that Welles himself disparaged it, giving sole credit and blame for the
device to screenwriter Herbert J. Mankiewicz.2 Pauline Kael claims
that “Welles is right, of course, about Rosebud–it is dollar­book
Freudianism … about as phony as the blind­beggar­for­luck­bit,”3 but
like Bogdanovich and Welles himself, she seems to miss the real
stakes of it. The mystery is not that Rosebud as a single object might
tell us the secret of Kane’s tragedy, but that Rosebud is part of a
melancholy series of objects that define Kane, the trajectory of his
life, and the hope consumer cultures invest in commodities. Caught in
the spell of alienation cast by unlimited money and power, Kane treats
all those around him as objects and looks to objects as if they were
people. At his dying moment, he seeks to recapture and legitimate his
life through a gathering of objects, of which Rosebud is merely one, a
synecdoche for his obsessive and nostalgic desire to collect.
 Nostalgia 175

In the beginning of the film, the journalists screen a rough cut

of their newsreel obituary to Kane, and both the title card and the
voice of News On the March name him “Xanadu’s Landlord.” Over
the montage of staggering images of wealth, the narrator intones in
biblical cadences the scale of Kane’s desire as it is embodied in his
earthly Xanadu: “One hundred thousand trees, twenty thousand tons
of marble are the ingredients of Xanadu’s mountain. Contents of
Xanadu’s palace: paintings, pictures, statues, the very stones of many
another palace–a collection of everything so big it can never be
catalogued or appraised, enough for ten museums–the loot of the
world. Xanadu’s livestock: the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, the
beast of the field and jungle. Two of each, the biggest private zoo
since Noah.”4 Kane gathers together and collects. Through his objects
he hopes to order his world, to exercise a godlike power over the
vicissitudes of existence, emotional pain, and death.
The scope of this collection is so epic that the narrator
reminds us several times that it cannot be cataloged. One might
dismiss Kane as a deranged hoarder, unable to let go of any object, a
Collyer brother with unlimited wealth, but this would miss his real
ambition. Through his collection, Kane tries to remake the outside
world and thus liquidate his dependence on it. Xanadu is to be a world
in and of itself, complete, and in Kane’s control. The inevitable result
of his devotion to control, his nostalgia for a maternal plenitude
reconstituted in material objects, is the loss of every human
connection. Kane dies among his servants, who to him are simply
animated objects, bought and paid for. At the moment of his death, he
does not reach out for his lover or his friend, but instead clutches a
snow globe. The snow globe is a perfect object to reflect his desire,
enclosing forever in its own unchanging atmosphere a complete and
immortal world–a representation of his mother’s poor Colorado
boarding house. The audience, with its privileged, omniscient
perspective, understands that clutching the snow globe and saying
176 Banash

“Rosebud” constitute the same gesture, that these objects form a

series, and Kane hopes to redeem his life by gathering them together.
The scope of this gesture is only fully revealed in the final
moments of the film. In a long, overhead shot, the camera tracks
through the halls of Xanadu, where Kane has brought his collections:
paintings, pictures, statuary, furniture, every imaginable sort of object.
At first it seems a chaos, but then, as the shooting script imagines it,
“things of obviously enormous value are standing beside a kitchen
stove, an old rocking chair, and other junk, among which is also an
old sled, the self­same story” (Kael 288). Swirling around the stove,
the rocking chair, and the Rosebud sled of his youth are all the objects
in which Kane hoped to find the same completeness and control,
innocence, and hope. This is the real lesson of Citizen Kane, and
perhaps the largest part of the magic it still exerts on audiences. An
early title card in the newsreel quotes Kane: “I am, have been, and
will be only one thing–an American” (qtd. in Kael 107). For
American, we might well read consumer, for Kane is a titanic allegory
of the kind of culture of consumption pioneered and perfected in the
United States.
Collecting inspires a certain condescension from those
sufficiently resigned to the realities of sexuality and mortality not to
need such a particularly marked sublimation or prosthesis to
withstand the anxieties and horrors of everyday life. In its most
extreme forms, we are hard­pressed not to read the collection as a
symptom of psychosis, remembering just how often troubled villains
or outright serial killers are portrayed as collectors, from John
Fowles’s eponymous The Collector to Citizen Kane and the riches of
Xanadu to Hannibal Lecter and his storage facility. Collections often
inspire an emphatic silence, an uncanny and funeral finality that
invokes the abjection of the corpse they would conjure away. The
practice of collecting responds to the problems of sex and death, and
thus collections are deeply connected to that other form of
sublimation, art itself. Still, to understand collage as a form, we must
 Nostalgia 177

confront not only its radical cutting, castrating prerogatives, but its
dream of bringing things together again, making whole, gathering.
Behind the critical masks of the most prolific collage artists of the
century there is almost always a secretly nostalgic collector.

The Collection behind the Cut

Andy Warhol is best known for his pop art provocations, which often
rely on readymades, objects that shouldn’t be art: those Brillo boxes
and newspaper clippings winking at us from museum walls. The
image we most cherish of Warhol is the bewigged hipster putting on
media squares at his tin­foiled factory. Indeed, those images of his
studio are remarkable for the clean lines, the glittering walls and
expanses of floor, with perhaps one or two assistants working on a
single gigantic canvas. There is simply no clutter, hardly anything at
all but the people themselves: Andy and his stable of superstars.
However, well hidden from the eyes of most of his audience and even
many who knew him was a lifelong obsession with collecting. At his
untimely death in 1987, he had amassed collections of Kane­like
proportions, his town house stuffed to the rafters with cookie jars,
early American furniture, art deco bric­a­brac, and thousands of
pieces of jewelry. Indeed, the appraisers who entered his home were
shocked at the scope of all this, “flabbergasted,” as appraiser Barbara
Deisroth exclaimed.5 It took more than two months to catalog it all,
more than 10,000 items going immediately for auction at Sotheby’s.
Victor Bockris observes: “Opulent as these rooms were, they seemed
dead: They had the air of a never­visited but exceedingly well­kept
provincial museum. Deisroth thought: ‘There was no life, no
laughter’” (2). That desiccated stillness is even more palpable in
Warhol’s other shocking venture into collecting, the Time Capsules.
Warhol would assemble a series of items from his everyday life, seal
them in a box, and put them on a shelf. There are more than 600 of
them, not yet all opened or cataloged. The items range from the truly
ephemeral (a slice of Caroline Kennedy’s birthday cake from a party
178 Banash

in the early 70s), to the odd (a mummified foot), or the utterly banal
(silverware he kept from a flight on Air France).6 Warhol’s most
private spaces are much more similar to Kane’s Xanadu, more
obsessive and strange than his critical, rational factory, but there is a
dialectical relationship between them, as the hidden collection powers
that radicalized collage.
Works of collage depend on two moments, cutting apart and
gathering together, and yet these two moments are really complex
mirrors of one another, a profound chiasmus, for the moment of
cutting already presupposes a kind of collection or gathering together
that must first be shattered, and the moment of collé, to glue
fragments, is to create another order again, recalling the first moment
of the collection, but this time, letting the seams show. This nostalgic,
obsessive, and perhaps spiritual impulse is at the heart of both Walter
Benjamin’s criticism and the art of Joseph Cornell. Like Warhol, both
Benjamin and Cornell might be best described as collectors. Both
amassed vast collections of fragments: for Benjamin, endlessly
proliferating quotations, thousands of books, postcards, images, toys;
for Cornell, dossiers and portfolios devoted to celebrities and artists,
dime store objects, records, films, and talismans of all sorts from
everyday encounters. Both sought some way to recapture and
understand the past through the process of collection. While it seems
quite obvious to suggest that the reclusive and dreamy Cornell is first
and foremost a collector, to grasp Benjamin in this same light is
troubling. What distinguishes the collector from the critic is the
profoundly private, meditative, and acquisitive obsession of the
former with the public, progressive, and transformative desires of the
latter. While the collector wants to grasp and hold–indeed own–the
fullness of a frozen past, the critic wants to analyze and understand in
the hope of overcoming the past. For both Benjamin and Cornell,
these two fraught tensions would inform their collage work. Cornell’s
wholly uncritical passions are in constant tension with his progressive
 Nostalgia 179

techniques and forms; Benjamin’s critical desires are endlessly

enmeshed in his own desire to simply collect.
For the most well­known anthology of Benjamin’s writings,
Illuminations, editor Hannah Arendt introduces Walter Benjamin as a
collector by way of his essay, “Unpacking My Library.” In this deeply
personal and brilliant work, Benjamin reflects on his passion not so
much for books as for collecting itself, exploring the complex
relationships between order, chaos, memory, and ownership. Rather
than beginning with the most obvious fact of most collectors–that
they are deeply invested in preserving and fixing and ordering the
past, Benjamin instead says the collector must constantly dwell in
chaos. “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s
passion borders on the chaos of memories.”7 These memories are
caught up in the eras from which the objects come, their provenance,
and most importantly, the collector’s personal relationship to them:
“The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of
individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the
final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them” (60). Yet for all
the chaos, there is something quite static and funerary in that
formulation, all the more curious when Benjamin goes on to say that
“[t]o renew the old world–this is the collector’s deepest desire” (61).
But to renew the old world is not to change or transform it, but to
more precisely make it persist in a new time, or, even more, to simply
live in the past. Benjamin ends his essay by invoking the objects of
the collector: “Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in
them” (66). Benjamin’s lifework was really his secret collection, a
vast sea of quotations and images, arranged and organized with
Byzantine care in a series of “convolutes.” What this collection might
have become had Benjamin lived we will never know, and it has come
down to us today as The Arcades Project. The convolutes are devoted
to a wide range of subjects from “fashion” to the “commune,” and
represent, essentially, fragments and scraps, a collection of quotations
180 Banash

and reflections that Benjamin spent his life piecing together, so it

comes as no surprise that one of these convolutes is devoted to “The
Collector.”
In fragment H4a,1, he writes: “Perhaps the most deeply
hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way:
he takes up the struggle against dispersion. Right from the start, the
great collector is struck by the confusion, by the scatter, in which the
things of the world are found.”8 Like Freud, Lacan, and Baudrillard,
Benjamin first sees the collection as an aggressive and desperate
attempt to order the world, to make sense of it, and control it. This
depends not only on a simple amassing of objects, but making orders
and arrangements among these objects to endow them with sense.
Benjamin opposes this impulse to that of the allegorist, who “has
given up the attempt to elucidate things through research into their
properties and relations. [The allegorist] dislodges things from their
contexts and, from the outset, relies on his profundity to illuminate
their meaning” (211). The allegorist is simply another name for the
collage artist, blasting objects out of their context, bringing them into
unusual relationships that create a proliferation of meanings and
shock effects. For Benjamin, these figures are in a profound
relationship, and he concludes this reflection by observing: “As far as
the collector is concerned, his collection is never complete; for let him
discover just a single piece missing, and everything he’s collected
remains a patchwork, which is what things are for allegory from the
beginning. On the other hand, the allegorist–for whom objects
represent only keywords in a secret dictionary, which will make
known their meaning only to the initiated–precisely the allegorist can
never have enough of things” (211). Another way to put this: in the
collection the objects become useless while in the allegory they
function.
Jean Baudrillard concludes his essay, “The System of
Collecting,” with the following observation: “The process of
collecting is necessarily recurrent and finite; its very
 Nostalgia 181

constituents–being objects–are too concrete, too discontinuous for it

to be capable of articulating itself as a real dialectical structure.”9 This
is to say that the collection can never go beyond itself; there is no
internal contradiction that might drive it to become something else,
and the collector, devoted to this affirmative and unchanging ideal
order, questing for an unalterable but unattainable completeness, must
always remain, at least in these psychoanalytic terms, an infant
warding off trauma with an elaborate game of fort­da. Yet something
often does interrupt this melancholy desire for order, and it goes under
various names: allegory, pastiche, montage, assemblage, and collage.
Indeed it is in the French, as both collectez and collage, both drawing
on the Latin colligere, to “gather together.” Thus, papier collés, those
first readymades of modern art and collage, are the defining form of
twentieth­century art. Yet before one can collage, one must cut into
things, pull them apart, smash and fracture them. Baudrillard
theorizes the collection as a way of warding off castration anxiety; the
collection is private and finite, defined by ownership and control. Or,
as Walter Benjamin notes, “the phenomenon of collecting loses its
meaning as it loses its personal owner” (“Unpacking” 62). Benjamin’s
remark makes more sense in the context of Baudrillard’s comment:
“When all is said and done, one never lends out one’s phallus. That
which the jealous person commandeers and guards in close proximity
is, beneath the disguise of an object, nothing less than his own libido”
(18). The dialectical moment, in which the melancholy stillness of the
collection (its would­be phallic plenitude), can be set dialectically
spinning into something new, transformative, and beyond itself is that
of collage, in which the order and private nature of the collection is
shattered by a moment of cutting and selection for a new
arrangement. In a striking formulation, Robert A. Latham maintains:
“Collage is a system of writing that denies paternity, asserting–in the
violent act of decoupage that inaugurates it–a castrating prerogative
over the texts constituting official culture.”10 Though rather than the
canonical and ideological texts Latham has in mind, we might think
182 Banash

of the private collections that collage artists depend on to fuel their

productions–the moment of collage as an escape out of a suffocating,
if illusory, fullness.
Like Benjamin and Warhol, Cornell’s death revealed the
collector behind the artist. Cornell’s house was bursting with
collections of all sorts. The basement was largely taken up with boxes
of dime store objects and cut­out illustrations (typical boxes have
labels like owls, plastic shells, and watch parts). But while we might
be tempted to dismiss such a collection as simply a hoard of treasure
waiting to find a suitable collage, Cornell had far more conventional
collections.11 For instance, thousands of records overwhelmed rooms
on his first floor. He was also one of the earliest collectors of silent
movies in America, saved hundreds of films from oblivion, and spent
much of his time organizing, enhancing, restoring, and maintaining
his collection of films. For much of his life, Cornell was better known
as a collector of film than an artist. Cornell was also a balletomane,
collecting the ephemera of both the romantic and the contemporary
ballet. His private collection of dance­related books and visual
materials made him a respected figure in the dance community and he
was a frequent contributor to magazines like Dance Index. Perhaps it
is with his dance­related material that we can most clearly see the
contradictions and connections between collecting and collage.
Cornell often developed obsessions with particular figures,
especially ballerinas. He would begin a collection devoted to one,
taking the form of a scrapbook or album. The objects in these
collections included images, texts, clippings, objects, and all sorts of
ephemera connected to a particular figure. There were often hundreds
or thousands of items in a given album, and Cornell would continue
to add or subtract items from them over the years, never able to see
any of them as complete. The depth and complexity of these albums is
probably the least studied of Cornell’s work, and for an obvious
reason: there is simply no way to present the items without great
violence to the whole. Cornell himself thought about this difficulty,
 Nostalgia 183

and proposed a number of lavish schemes to overcome the problem.

Biographer Deborah Solomon recounts one such proposal: “He
mentioned to Donald Windham that he hoped to publish his albums in
large, cheap editions and wondered whether they could be sold in
dime­stores. ‘He thought this was a practical idea, and potentially
profitable one, too,’ Windham later recalled with amusement, adding
that it seemed not to have occurred to Cornell that the people who
frequented five­and­dimes to purchase nail polish and mixed nuts
might not be as interested as he was in collecting pictures of Fanny
Cerrito” (162).
The closest that Cornell came to this solution was Windham’s
eventual invitation for Cornell to do an entire issue of Dance Index as
a selection from the Cerrito album. Solomon observes: “Only Cornell
could have put together a whole magazine in which there were no
original articles but rather ‘ready­made’ stories and pictures–a book
compiled from other people’s books” (163). Here, Cornell is forced
by his desire to make his collection visible to others to accept the
violence of collage. Yet the body of this collage tries at every step to
make the impression of the larger album, rather like one of Marcel
Duchamp’s suitcase miniatures of his complete work; every cut seems
to strain toward a perfect synecdoche, in which the microcosm would
be an unproblematic reflection of the larger whole. Yet, as a brilliant
collage, this cutting into the material depends on the larger whole
from which it has been ripped.
It is his other dance masterpiece, Taglioni’s Jewel Casket,
which depends on Cornell’s collections but simultaneously smashes
through them to become something quite different, an allegory, in
Benjamin’s sense. Like most of Cornell’s work, this one begins in
obsession. Marie Taglioni was a major ballerina of the romantic era,
dancing the title role of La Sylphide in 1832. She was famous for
carrying the jewels bestowed on her by princes, kings, and other
luminaries and powers, and thus the story as Cornell himself recounts
it on the lid of his box:
184 Banash

Joseph Cornell, Taglioni’s Jewel Casket, 1940. © VAGA, NY. The

Museum of Modern Art, New York. SCALA / Art Resource,
New York.
 Nostalgia 185

On a moonlight night in the winter of 1835, the carriage of Marie Taglioni

was halted by a Russian highwayman, and that enchanting creature
commanded to dance for this audience of one upon a panther’s skin spread
over the snow beneath the stars. From this actuality arose the legend that to
keep alive the memory of this adventure so precious to her, Taglioni formed
the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket or dressing
table, where, melting among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint
of the atmosphere of the starry heavens over the ice covered landscape.12

Artificial ice cubes, used for commercial displays and photographs,

were just the sort of object that Cornell was drawn to his whole life.
Amazingly, here the crass commercial fake becomes alchemy, a
startling jewel more arresting than actual jewels could ever be since
these stones become the memento of an evanescent experience of the
imagination, too delicate and certainly too precious to withstand the
heat of real life. Thus, these cubes, cut into a cast­off jewelry box,
surrounded by a strand of glass rhinestones, become allegory, objects
prized precisely because they become “a secret dictionary, which will
make known their meanings to the initiated” (Arcades 211). Yet this
entire construction could not have happened without Cornell the
collector, arranging and choosing, amassing a population of objects
that might produce such magic resonance if only the collector could
give over to the violence of collage. Notably, Cornell did in fact fear
that violence, and very few of his best images were originals. The
images that appear in works like Medici Slot Machine or Penny
Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall are in fact high­quality photostatic
reproductions. The original images remain uncut and unharmed in the
files and albums dedicated to all the major boxes or series of his
career. Cornell was never comfortable with the cuts that would truly
threaten the collection and turned to mechanical reproduction to solve
the problem.13
186 Banash

Just as Cornell’s initial obsession with the ballet led first to

collecting and then to collage, so followed his found­footage films.
Cornell had been finding and saving film for years before he made
Rose Hobart, his cinematic masterpiece that seems to effortlessly
transmute a bit of orientalist Hollywood trash into a hypnotic and
disturbing surrealism. Instead of the colonialist fantasy of the original
film East of Borneo, Cornell cuts out all of the plot (a predictable love
triangle), and chooses odd transitions and movements of the actress
Rose Hobart, shots of her hands, the actress walking through
doorways, close­ups of her eyes. He replaced the soundtrack with a
loop of Brazilian music, slowed it down to silent speed, and projected
the black and white images through a blue filter. P. Adams Sitney
observes: “Only a collector of films could have made this kind of
montage. When one owns a print of a film and shows it repeatedly,
accidents happen in the projection and rewinding: passages are
damaged and strange ellipses occur in their repair. While most
collectors regard these with horror and would prefer to ignore them,
perhaps Cornell made these accidents of deterioration the formal
model for this first film” (75). This is to say that rather than simply
being horrified by the breaks and cutting that must happen to the
collector of film, Cornell makes of it a dialectical motor, a knife­
edged contradiction that blasts the collection out of its deathly silence
and into new life.
The relationship between collecting and collage has been
particularly pronounced in the genre of found­footage films, and
figures such as Bruce Conner, Craig Baldwin, and Rick Prelinger are
all avid collectors of discarded industrial and educational films. Much
of their work was precipitated, as was Cornell’s, by the imminent
disappearance of this material as films became outdated and were
simply discarded, or, more recently, as media moved first to video
tape and then to digital formats, spurring schools and businesses to
begin a wholesale liquidation of several generations of films. In
particular, Prelinger amassed one of the largest private collections of
 Nostalgia 187

such industrial films in the world, and like Cornell, Connor, and
Baldwin, has created feature­length films from it, such as Panorama
Ephemera. And yet, collections are often where they are never seen,
and their role in making possible works of art goes unremarked. For
instance, director John Waters is a fanatic collector of both grindhouse
and crime ephemera, books, and film posters, as stray comments in
his books as well as photographs of his home and office attest;14 and
though few would think of Waters as a collector, his encyclopedic
knowledge of film culture, subculture, and kitsch is objectified and
informed by the collections that fuel his own filmmaking.
Interestingly, his images on the Dreamland website certainly
acknowledge this.15
Just as vast collections of unknown visual material make
possible many kinds of filmmaking, music that depends on techniques
of mixing, scratching, and sampling are made possible only by vast
collections that are completely opaque to the audience. In Last Night
a DJ Saved My Life, Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton remark that
to become a DJ, one needs “a love of records strong enough to make
your boyfriend or girlfriend jealous.”16 Indeed, they go on to reiterate
author Evan Eisenberg’s story of Clarence, a record collector who
squandered a fortune until “all he had left was the house–unheated,
unlit, so crammed with trash that the door wouldn’t open–and three­
quarters of a million records.”17 Speaking about the creation of his
landmark, sample­heavy album Odelay in Rolling Stone, Beck
remembers that the studio “was tiny. And one wall, floor to ceiling,
was all records.” Although Beck maintains that “a lot of Odelay was
played, not sampled,” many of those records were used, ranging from
Them’s version of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (the organ part
became the backbone of “Jack­Ass”) to a sex­ed album called Sex for
Teens (Where It’s At), which provided the most comic parts of the
single “Where It’s At.”18 Yet, Brewster and Broughton claim it isn’t
simply a vast collection that makes a DJ. “The essence of the DJ’s
craft is selecting which records to play and in what order” (9). That is,
188 Banash

moving from the position of the mere collector to that of the

allegorist.
One could continue at some length with similar examples in a
number of media, but it is clear that the collection–especially to
twentieth­century visual art, film, and music–is extraordinarily
important and perhaps unprecedented. Indeed, I might end this list by
simply noting that Sigmund Freud was a prodigious collector of
ancient statuary, and André Breton a collector of both primitive and
modern art, and yet, in both cases, the true scope of their collecting in
relation to philosophy and art respectively have elicted relatively little
comment.
In “The System of Collecting,” Baudrillard observes: “The
singular object never impedes the process of narcissistic projection,
which ranges over an indefinite number of objects: on the contrary, it
encourages such multiplication, thus associating itself with a
mechanism whereby the image of the self is extended to the very
limits of the collection. Here, indeed, lies the whole miracle of
collecting. For it is invariably oneself that one collects” (12). One
needs only to think of Warhol’s rather abject time capsules or Kane’s
great hall to see the point here: surely collecting is a profound form of
narcissism. Nonetheless, Baudrillard has little to say about what
people collect, and it is here that perhaps the tones and tenors of the
particular pool one gazes into must color and shade this projection,
transforming its motions and moments. Indeed, might not the
collection reach a kind of critical mass, an explosive point where its
own shapes and demands profoundly inform and transform our
projections, pushing and pulling us to the very limits of a collection
that comes to exceed us? Perhaps such moments are just those
potentially dialectical hinges that might spin us from the position of
the collector into that of the allegorist.
In “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin recognizes the
narcissism and the melancholy stillness of order, but suggests that the
 Nostalgia 189

practice of collecting, rather than the collection itself, might volatize

it, renewing both the objects and the subject of collecting:

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves,
not yet touched by the mild boredom of order … I must ask you to join me
in the disorder of the crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated
with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among
piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness,
so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood–it is certainly
not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation–which these books
arouse in a genuine collector. (59)

The narcissism of collecting, the obsession with objects and

orders, brings us to the other side of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade.
In the previous chapter, I emphasized the radical and critical energy of
Duchamp’s gesture, but it is Baudrillard who most clearly thinks
through the dialectical transformation of the readymade to the very
end of the century and to the end of art itself. In The Conspiracy of
Art, he argues that Duchamp’s gesture was not just provocation but an
event. In the readymade, the artist abandons fantasy and the
possibility of critical distance. Simply choosing a commodity and
presenting it, all the world is aestheticized, liquidating the critical
functions of aesthetics. Baudrillard observes that “the world is a
readymade and all we can do is to maintain the illusion or the
superstition of art by means of a space in which objects are moved
and which will necessarily become a museum. But the museum, as its
name indicates, is a sarcophagus all the same.”19 While Baudrillard
seems apocalyptically gloomy here, his real point is more persuasive,
for he still believes “magical events” can occur, but they occur outside
the traditional history of art. They occur when people play inventively
and unexpectedly with the absence of aesthetics and define new
territories for the readymade beyond the critical functions of
traditional aesthetics. “Andy Warhol is an example, another artist who
190 Banash

introduced nothingness into the heart of the image” (53). However,

the problem is no longer just the image, but the very preponderance of
objects themselves. While well outside the main lines of the
contemporary art scene, the recent, largely unseen work of William
Davies King is exactly, as it is titled, Collections of Nothing. In his
collection, King takes on the very problem of the readymade, our
world of objects, and the dialectic of Zarathustra­Kane, the twin
impulses to shatter and gather.

Collections of Nothing
To read William Davies King is to realize that what was once
evanescent has now become material. There is hardly an experience,
an emotion, a sensibility, an identity, or a desire that is not somehow
enmeshed in the relentless necromancy of the commodity, pulled
down to earth and given a concrete form: cereal boxes and ticket
stubs, pharmaceutical company coffee mugs and branded water
bottles. This relationship to objects is historically unprecedented, and
its reality and effects have hardly been noticed. If anything, our
relationship to this world of objects is relentless appetite coupled with
absolute incomprehension. Perhaps this is why George Romero’s
shopping mall zombies are such a compelling image to us still: they
crave without consciousness. While artists like Joseph Cornell and
Jeff Koons have taken up the ubiquity of the object, somehow the
very sublimity of their works does less to reveal the everyday than to
transcend it. They seem to say to us that if we just knew how, we
could unlock a door to the hidden Shangri­la these purchases
promised to us in the first place. William Davies King does not
transcend the material in some ecstatic flight; he reaches out and pulls
us into the very stuff of our world–ordinary, ubiquitous things.
King is a prodigious collector of the ordinary, and his book
Collections of Nothing is the story of how he amassed not only 8,000
books and almost half as many records, but approximately three tons
of much stranger and more troubling evidence from a lifetime of
 Nostalgia 191

consumption: he estimates that he has now perhaps 75,000 objects.

Such ordinary stuff is represented right on the very book itself. The
cover for Collections of Nothing presents us with fourteen swatches.
They run from dramatic blue plaids to rich brown weaves and
textured tan hatches. On first glance, I took them for tasteful playing
cards that middle­class, contract bridge fanatics so often have in their
well­kept homes. Yet what stares at us from the cover is not the banal
and ordinary backs of playing cards, but the disturbingly,
unconscious, and ubiquitous object, which I confess to not even
recognizing. I was simply shocked when King introduces us to these
swatches:

So, because I would like to be welcome, welcome reader, I might begin by

showing you my collection of envelope linings. It seems that many people
fear that if they send a check or some other document through the mail, it
will surely be noticed by a nosy postal carrier or a larcenous neighbor, and
so an assortment of envelopes is available, lined with some dense pattern to
prevent anyone holding it up to the sun and reading the contents. Those are
envelope linings, and I have a very large binder containing two­inch by
three­inch cuts from such envelopes … There are currently over eight
hundred distinct envelope linings in the collection. No one covets what I
have (I have found no Web site for envelope linings), but when people look
at this collection I know that I have something rare and extraordinary, even
eye­opening.20

No one covets such a collection, but not one of us understands it

either, and we cannot understand because we are quite simply
unaware of the very super­abundance through which we swim like
creatures, unconscious of our very sea. In a way, this surfeit of stuff
makes us all into Citizen Kanes now, immersed in our consumer
flows.
In The System of Objects, Baudrillard turns his attention to the
sudden glut of consumer culture infesting every space, domestic and
192 Banash

William Davies King, a collection of envelope linings. Reproduced

courtesy of the artist.
 Nostalgia 193

public, with objects: “How is the ‘language’ of ‘objects’ spoken?” (9)

he asks. Baudrillard’s futurist gaze turns upon new gadgets and plastic
furniture, polyester clothes and hi­fi, a whole world of things that are
substantial and, ironically, even collectible, and he concludes that
“objects now are by no means meant to be owned and used but solely
to be produced and bought” [emphasis in original] (176). But along
with all those things Baudrillard theorizes, consider all the things in
which those things arrived–boxes, packaging, labeling, and the
like–that are no­things and that we buy simply so we can throw them
away. Perhaps the trajectory of the twentieth century is best
represented by those artists who intuited that the real fate of objects
was not to congeal into ownership but to flow through our lives.
Novelist Don DeLillo’s masterpiece Underworld gets this, rubbing
our noses in repressed disposables. The unimaginably large Fresh
Kills landfill is described as such: “It was science fiction and
prehistory, garbage arriving twenty­four hours a day, hundreds of
workers, vehicles with metal rollers compacting the trash.” Looking
at the vast accumulation of trash, DeLillo’s character Brian Glassic
“imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramid at
Giza–only this was twenty­five times bigger, with tanker trucks
spraying perfumed water on the approach roads.”21 Here is a new kind
of Xanadu, and DeLillo isn’t alone to intuit that it is what we cast off
that defines the century. Even the mystical optimist Jack Kerouac was
fascinated by it, and the whole Beat movement played constantly with
the idea of turning to the physical detritus of our culture. Indeed,
toward the end of On the Road, the most striking image is not of
freedom on highways under Western skies, but being swept out of a
grindhouse with the trash: “All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the
matchbooks, the come and the gone were swept up in this pile. Had
they taken me with it, Dean would never have seen me again. He
would have had to roam the entire United States and look in every
garbage pail from coast to coast before he found me embryonically
convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life, and the life of
194 Banash

everybody concerned and not concerned. What would I have said to

him from my rubbish womb?”22 Kerouac’s hymn to making a heroic
self turns again and again to the cast­offs and trash that seem to both
constitute and undo that self, and perhaps that too is the story of our
moment, our profoundly generative irony and tremendous nostalgia
for a mythic, maternal past that we might cling to in our cast­off
things. Perhaps from his rubbish womb Sal Paradise would have said
something very close to what King has to tell us: “down near the
bottom is nothing, is art. Once in a while, or in some ways subtly
always, by collecting nothing, I make it, big and high and holy” (127).
King observes: “My collecting continues to be oppressive to
others and myself,” (6) and perhaps this is because, like Sal, it both
makes and undoes a self, and as readers we cannot help but see him as
a mystical synecdoche for consumer culture, a microcosm reflecting
the making and unmaking of our American selves. Rather than rare
books, figurines, master works, or kitsch, King collects what most of
us throw away: cereal boxes, the labels of bottled waters, metal
objects flattened by cars, bottle caps, labels from tuna fish, cat food,
and soup cans, cigar bands, matchboxes, cellophane­wrapped
coupons, skeleton keys, business cards, postcards, envelopes,
trademarks, expired library cards, expired and promotional credit
cards, PLU fruit labels: all “collections of nothing.” In an
unimaginable contingency, he would be our man: “We require a
Triscuits box from 1986, a complete box! Citizens who can fulfill this
demand should report to …” (82). Of course, in America, almost all
lives are now collections, but of things that one is expected to collect.
King observes that “middle­class life is itself a collection: a spouse, a
house, a brace of children, a suitable car, a respectable career, cuddly
pets, photos of grinning relatives, toys for all ages and hours, coffee
and coffeepots, coffee cups and spoons, coffee tables and coffee table
books about coffee and about coffee tables” (2–3). One is reminded of
those very first capitalists, the Dutch merchants of the seventeenth
century who were so fond of having the old masters paint them
 Nostalgia 195

among their domestic accumulations, and yet those collections were

luxurious or permanent: beautiful foods and crystal, wine and silver,
art, and, of course, the homes themselves. While such objects are still
with us, treasured and valued, what King collects is what he
constantly thinks of as the vast objectified nothing of modern life:
“What made my chicken scratch into collecting was the fact that there
was a category I was trying to fill, and that category should cohere. It
could be called Things That Are No Things, or Nothing” (51). It is all
the packaging, the disposable, the cast­off flood that he has dammed
up, his own magnificently organized Fresh Kills.
King writes movingly of a childhood in middle­class
suburban Ohio, and gives us a vivid portrait of a child in a troubled
but smart and demanding family. There is trauma here, though, and
the most harrowing moments come when he writes candidly about his
sister, Cindy, confined first to a wheelchair, and later, to
schizophrenia: “The widely shared impulse to collect comes partly
from a wound we feel deep inside this richest, most materialistic of all
societies, and partly from a wound that many of us feel in our
personal histories” (7). King feels both sides of this wound, and as his
family wrestles with trauma, the young King turns to objects and
archeology, digging through a defunct suburban incinerator: “My
boyhood was not in ruins exactly, but certain things had broken,
others were burning, and much had gotten buried. I needed to dig
deep in that ash pit, and I still do. I look for something warm” (18).
But King’s family history runs parallel to the blossoming wounds of
postwar America. Sent away to boarding school at Phillips Academy,
Andover, King notes that: “It was 1968, and the Vietnam War was
rattling, protests loud and long, hair growing everywhere, and legal
and illegal, moral and immoral smoke in the air. My innocence was
already casting an eye on Canada” (35). At Andover, middle­class
King also confronted a culture of aristocratic distinctions. His peers
reveled in postwar consumer culture and sophistication. Somewhat
aloof from them, he spent his time gleaning: “Sure enough, when I
196 Banash

looked, pieces of metal were there for the taking … remove the rust
and the grease from almost any twisted piece of steel, and there will
be a touching story of form deformed. My room gradually filled up”
(38). King makes a sensitive connection to his education, his peers,
and his metal objects with this elegiac catalog worthy of Rick
Moody’s The Ice Storm:

With a rag I would polish them, while doing my homework or listening to

the radio, during class, chapel, and indoctrination (they advised us not to
smoke, to buy low and sell high, to bow to the powerful but not to
ourselves). Even an old gas cap, crushed on the road, would take on a
certain luster when polished and become a tasty by­product of highway
beautification. Railroad spikes, pliers, spigots, stopcocks, saws–I probably
had half a ton of these things. They were my Rossignol skies, my Bass
Weejuns, my Pioneer amp, my Jack Kramer tennis racket, my subscription
to Esquire. Though I understood very well why I should, I did not in fact
have an MGB secretly garaged in town, no Brooks Brothers shirts or Sperry
Topsiders, no perfect smile of cheekbone high but I had this. (38)

And so King takes us through the moments of his life: his

coming­of­age, his development as a would­be performance artist,
and later, a professor of theater with a middle­class life of his own.
Throughout, changes in his personal life and the culture itself are
marked in his prodigious, inventive, and disturbing practices of
collecting. For a time after graduation, King worked as an assistant in
the Special Collections departments for Yale’s libraries, and also as a
part­time janitor. Both jobs are more or less about putting things back
into their places, ordering the effluvia of life. It was at this time that
King had his real eureka: “Then it began, the first real collection of
my adult life. One day I started to save the labels of all the food
products I consumed–cereal, soup, candy, beer” (82). Into carefully
organized folders they went. Some of the most remarkable moments
 Nostalgia 197

William Davies King, a metal object from his collection. Reproduced

courtesy of the artist.
198 Banash

in the book are when King actually makes lists of all the varieties of
tuna fish or bottled water he has labels for–the lists go on for pages.
Of course, at first he had only a few scavenged binders to fill
with the modest consumption of a graduate student. The remarkable
thing is that he never gave up collecting, and finds himself wrestling
with the weight of his commitment: “My collection is a picture of
middle­aged me. To collect is to predicate middle age. The novice
collector has that gnawing desire but only a few paltry things, then
more and more as the years go by … Cyclonic, the midcareer
collector becomes a solitary force of nature, with familiar things all
whirling in the air” (94). The lyricism here is self­conscious but
compelling, and just as King seems to have flirted with the life of an
artist from his youth only to find himself a collector and a scholar, it
is his collection that now reaches a critical mass, becoming art,
forcing itself out into collages as he describes just how the quotidian
is whirling around him in a series of fascinating orders. For instance,
King found an old, mechanical address book and “saw it as an
organizer of tiny emblems, an alphabetical incorporated world,” and
so it became a vast directory of trademarks, and “by the end the
gadget bulged, and I needed a dog collar to keep it closed” (116). In
an incomplete stamp collection from his childhood, he now pastes in
only those commercial squares that direct us to “Place Stamp Here.”
He has drawers of three­by­five cards, each presenting oddments,
such as “like the color bar found on packaging” or “the admonitory
words ‘Not for Passover Use’ from a matzo carton,” or more simply
“the red rose from a Red Rose tea bag.” These, King tells us, form “ a
serial collage, viewable in any sequence” (120). For many years, King
had a blank laboratory notebook, and then suddenly: “I knew that I
wanted to fill the book with the diminutive illustrations you find in
dictionaries, those skimpy, anonymous imagettes, so obsequiously not
Art” (23).23 King estimates he spent 350 hours cutting and pasting to
make that particular collection­collage. He has no illusions about the
kind of beauty that his works have, he doesn’t seem to aspire to the
 Nostalgia 199

beauty that assemblage artists so desire in their found objects: “There

is little inherent beauty in these bits and pieces. Instead there is often
an echo of an aggravating, noisy, cluttered world, a jabbering world of
commercial imperative, money on the barrelhead, or bureaucratic
bog­down” (119). Rather than making us see a world of beauty, King
makes us simply see the world of consumer capitalism, our world of
disposable objects.
Walter Benjamin maintains that the invention of cinema
fundamentally altered our consciousness, bringing into focus minute
aspects of the world one would never see without the camera, its
close­ups and slow­motion pans disclosing our optical unconscious.
In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” he claims: “By close­ups of the things around us, by
focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring
commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera,
the film on the one hand extends our comprehension of the necessities
which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an
immense and unexpected field of action.”24 Benjamin suggests that
the power of the camera to bring our world into focus dramatically
alters our perception of it, most often by slowing things down or
getting us much closer to them, and King’s fascinating habit of
collecting does, I think, something much the same. He is one of the
few people who have taken the time to really look at our world of
disposable objects. His practice of collecting has slowed him down
and shifted him into a new mode of consciousness, and he thus allows
us something like a close­up, slow­motion pan across all the objects
that we so quickly turn away from that they never really register with
us as the things that they are. King’s altered consciousness is not a
gateway into some other world, but a blinding illumination of our
everyday unconscious.
200 Banash

Framing Collections and Collage

By the middle of the twentieth century, lives devoted to consuming all
these objects, processing them into styles of perception, and
assembling literal lifestyles through them became the norm in the
United States, and theorists began to notice that both things, as well as
the objects of the mediascape, demanded an accounting. Marshall
McLuhan argues that the entire mediascape presents to us a vast
“mosaic” that demands cool styles of perception, while we
simultaneously attempt to live out the “cool” valorized lifestyles
through our consumer choices. Collage forms enact this shift in
perception and repeat the injunction to consume. The fragmented, and
often multimedia, forms of collage mirror the kinds of attention our
mediated world demands of us each day; the creation of a work of art
through the selection and transformation of mass­mediated or mass­
produced readymades reflects the very processes through which
consumers make meaning by gathering together these objects.
Despite the critical celebration of avant­garde collage, such
disturbing and radical forms have generally not existed in the popular
culture, where collections, assemblages, and collages are carefully
framed or narrativized. The disjunctive montages of Soviet cinema
were turned into the Hollywood continuity; the dada politics of
photomontage is emptied of its critical force while its visual styles
find their way back into the montages of the advertising layouts that
first inspired them. Even the jarring and dissonant samples and cut­
ups of musique concrète and early hip­hop have given way to the
more unified, less layered, and generally more melodic electronica
and hip­hop of our present moment. Much of the same movement
could be tracked in contemporary media technologies and the
Internet, where the experience of browsing the web is becoming far
more carefully framed and smoothly narrativized in recent years.
Which is not to say that the producers of popular art forms do not
recognize the connections of both moments of collage–cutting and
pasting–to consumer culture. Indeed they do, but collage exists for
 Nostalgia 201

them more powerfully as a metaphor, and it is deployed as a practice

only when carefully framed and contained. To my mind, this suggests
a profound play of acknowledgment and repression, for the difficulty
of confronting the most disjunctive collage forms might just mean
confronting some of the real horrors and difficulties of modern life in
a world defined by consumption. To tackle that too directly, one risks
the kind of awareness that William Davies King so carefully narrates.
The problems of alienation and objects are instead frequently invoked
as metaphor in myriad collage forms, recuperated into a variety of
frames or narratives that guarantee more comfortable, but less
modern, modes of meaning even as these metaphors and images
gesture at a more difficult and painful reality of a world defined by
desires and objects, collages and collections.
Janet Fitch’s first novel, White Oleander, became an Oprah’s
Book Club selection and a major motion picture starring Reneé
Zellweger and Michelle Pfeiffer. The book itself is a polished novel
with an essentially nineteenth­century technique employed to
construct a typical bildungsroman. Astrid Magnussen, a young visual
artist, is abandoned by her mother Ingrid, a poet, who is sent to prison
for murdering her lover. Shuffled from one disastrous foster home to
another, the young Astrid seeks to come of age, reconcile the divisive
relationship with her mother, and find her voice as an artist. However,
what defines Astrid’s experience is the substitution of styles of
consumption for traditional family structures, and it is through collage
and assemblage that Astrid makes sense of her life. In pivotal
moments, Astrid turns to collage to express her desires, and by the
end of the book, she becomes something of a pastiche of Joseph
Cornell and Marcel Duchamp. What is striking is that Fitch always
provides a seamless narrative for the fragmented life of Astrid, thus
giving the reader the pleasures of a closely­knit tale. The tale itself,
however, is one of fragmentation and confusion, and to convey this,
Fitch provides lyrical evocations of collage.
202 Banash

Astrid’s final foster home is with Rena Grushenka, a Russian

émigré who makes her living salvaging merchandise from the trash of
the rich to sell at swap meets. On her first morning with Rena, Astrid
is awakened, put in a van, and taken through the wealthy districts of
Los Angeles. “We continued to sift the city’s flotsam, rescuing a wine
rack and a couple of broken cane­bottom chairs. We took on an
aluminum walker, a box of musty books, and a full recycling bin of
Rolling Rock empties that sharpened the mold smell in the back.”25
Astrid’s apprenticeship in salvage with Rena becomes her final
lesson, and the key move through which she becomes an artist. Unlike
her mother, a lyric poet, Astrid does not seek to express herself
through a unique and unmistakable voice. Turning eighteen and
leaving Rena, Astrid thinks, “I had this Raphael sky. I had five
hundred dollars and an aquamarine from a dead woman and a future
in salvage” (409). To become an artist, Astrid turns to collage under
the sign of the commodity, collecting, and nostalgia. As she says,
“Rena stole my pride but gave me back something more, taught me to
salvage, glean from the wreckage what could be remade and resold”
(437).
Astrid begins to make Cornell­like suitcase­assemblages,
each representing one of her foster mothers through a selection of
lifestyle commodities: “That year, I craved suitcases. I haunted the
flea market near the Tiergarten, bargaining and trading for old­
fashioned suitcases … I was making altars inside them. Secret
portable museums” (434). This description invokes both the sacred
and the conservative, the altars suggesting profane illumination and
the museum emphasizing the practice of conservation and collection.
However, her collages articulate these ends through the logic of the
commodity. Like a consumer, Astrid packs each suitcase with the
commodities that define the lifestyles of each of the very different
women who influenced her. Each suitcase becomes a kind of map of
lifestyle, from the religious kitsch of rural poverty to the excesses of
suburban sprawl. Thus, while one suitcase is scented with “ma griffe
 Nostalgia 203

perfume,” another has “a little TV screen in the lid, where a

decoupaged Miss America beamed” (436). The description of the
suitcases continues on for almost two pages, and they contain
everything from guitar strings and counterfeit money to pearls,
rosemary, and barbed wire. The contents of each underscores that the
differences in each home are fundamentally communicated through
styles of consumption, and that Astrid comes to understand her past
by reassembling each lifestyle in miniature. Yet if the suitcases are
perfect maps of each life, it is because all the elements of the
suitcases are commodities; this suggests that it is commodity culture
that has both shattered her life and provided a ground and consistency
for its reassembly as she pastes it all back together. That Astrid should
turn to collage instead of lyric poetry or other forms of art makes
perfect sense. In a way, we might simply see her working through the
trauma of her childhood in the very commodified, objectified forms
that she initially experienced. Astrid admits, “I would never reach the
end of what was in those suitcases” (444). One might think of how
Kane never reached the end of his snow globe, Rosebud, or any of the
objects he assembled in his great hall.
Fitch’s White Oleander underscores just how readily the
aesthetic of collage communicates the problems of contemporary
everyday life in our popular imagination. Rather than finding collage
metaphors threatening or irrational (as they were to audiences in the
first decades of the twentieth century), by the end of the century, they
seem to exist as comfortable metaphors to describe lives ruled by that
form of collecting named shopping.

Angels of History: Nostalgic Collage

White Oleander is at one with Walter Benjamin’s critical commentary
on collage that begins in the 1930s, explaining the importance of fine
art collage in terms of the objects of commodity culture and profound
nostalgia, and it is telling that his work is so seamlessly reflected in
works like White Oleander or Generation X novels like Douglas
204 Banash

Coupland’s Shampoo Planet. What is fascinating about Benjamin is a

strident emphasis on the object in almost all his work, and the almost
total absence of people from his interests. For Benjamin, the critic
confronts the object, more often than not in the commodity form, to
make sense of the world. While one might turn to almost any of his
essays to demonstrate this, the importance of the object to his seminal
allegory, “The Angel of History” from the “Theses on the Philosophy
of History” is the most shocking instance:

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though

he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His
eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one
pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we
perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps
piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel
would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his
wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This
storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned,
while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we
call progress.26

The Klee drawing itself shows only the angel, and it is Benjamin who
provides the very concrete details. Like many other critics of
modernity, he chooses to emphasize the fragmentation of consumer
culture through the concrete image of “debris.” Benjamin’s image
makes a metonymic shift from the totality of time itself to that image
of “wreckage,” emphasizing the detritus of material culture so absent
from the drawing, the objects. In his ekphrasis, the angel regards the
past as less a temporal category than an accumulation of things in
which all time is simultaneously present. Indeed, this is a powerful
image of visual collage, with its emphasis on both fragmentation and
simultaneity. The angel, ostensibly the critic, would like to reassemble
 Nostalgia 205

these fragments, redeeming past moments, but those moments are

objects, and one can’t help but read here a deep allegory not of all
history, but that of commodity culture that so values the object. That
this very project–to take the cast­off readymades of the past and
assemble out of them some sense of order, history, and meaning–is a
key metaphor in best­selling novels invoking the same matrix of
collage forms, readymades, and commodities is remarkable.
Like Fitch’s White Oleander, Douglas Coupland’s 1992 novel
Shampoo Planet is not a work of collage. For all the reviews that
greeted Coupland as the voice of a new youth movement, one could
not imagine a more formally conventional novel. While the themes
are those of postmodern consumer culture, the novel itself hardly
deviates from the most staid techniques of nineteenth­century realism.
The novel’s first­person narrator is Tyler Johnson, a young twenty­
something, working­class youth with executive ambitions. Though
Coupland’s Shampoo Planet makes no reference to Benjamin’s
allegory, one wonders if it might not have served as an ironic
counterpoint to Tyler’s proposal to Bechtol’s CEO, Frank E. Miller.
Seeking access to the corporate fast track, Tyler writes a letter to the
growing company, suggesting a business plan that literalizes and
commodifies Benjamin’s allegory:

Well, to business, Mr. Miller: I have an idea for Bechtol that could net good
profit for your company. I will be brief.
To wit: I think our country is having a shortage of historical
objects–there are not enough old things for people to own. As well, we have
too many landfills, plus an ever­looming fuel shortage. So I therefore say,
Mr. Miller, “Why not combine these three factors with our country’s love of
theme parks and come out a winner?”
I suggest, Mr. Miller, that Bechtol develop a national chain of
theme parks called HistoryWorld™ in which visitors (wearing respirators
and outfits furnished by Bechtol’s military division) dig through landfill
sites abandoned decades ago (and purchased by Bechtol for next to
206 Banash

nothing) in search of historical objects like pop bottles, old telephones, and
furniture. The deeper visitors dig, the further visitors travel back in time,
and hence the more they would pay. HistoryWorld’s™ motto: INSTANT
HISTORY.27

This is Tyler’s fantasy of redeeming the past by gathering together the

wreckage and debris of consumer culture. Tyler hopes to put right the
failings of modernity. However, far from the more nuanced vision of
Benjamin, this is a fantasy without critical force. Unlike Benjamin’s
angel who would “awaken the dead,” Tyler imagines instead “Profit
Ahoy!” (201). Amusingly enough, Tyler’s letter secures an interview
with Bechtol’s CEO. Miller has a single question for Tyler, ironically
asking how he feels about the future. Tyler replies, “Well Sir … I
think in order to be happy–in order to deal with the future in a correct
and positive manner–one shouldn’t go around thinking life isn’t as
good as it used to be. Life must be better now than it ever was before,
and life is only going to become better and better in the future.” Not
surprisingly, CEO Miller replies with the repetition of a single word:
“Exactly. Exactly” (272). Tyler and Miller are not facing the past like
Benjamin’s angel, but blowing the unwilling angel into the future. Yet
Tyler is able to mobilize something of the same logic of collage (this
gathering together the past) that coordinates Benjamin’s allegory and
his literal collage, The Arcades Project. HistoryWorld™ is no less
compelling (and perhaps less utopian and more accurate) an allegory
of modernity than The Angel of History, with the same logic of
fragmentation and selection, cutting and pasting. Though Tyler’s
allegory adds one particular element that highlights its difference
from Benjamin: “Landfills are bursting with fuel: newspapers and
wood in particular. HistoryWorld™ visitors would not only be
excavating for exciting historical artifacts, but helping contribute to
alternative fuel sources, too” (200). Rather than waking the dead, the
wreckage of the past fuels the storm.
 Nostalgia 207

The commodities he chooses, ready­made from the pages of

catalogs, define Tyler’s identity and he differentiates himself from his
mother by contrasting her “depressing” hippie choices with his own
“tasteful” selections. In fact, the performance of identity through
consumption is the theme of the novel, communicated even in the title
Shampoo Planet. Tyler maintains that: “I have a good car and a wide
assortment of excellent hair­care products. I know what I want from
life; I have ambition” (13). Living in a world of ready­made
commodities and defining himself through them, Tyler’s dream of
HistoryWorld™ makes sense. For Tyler, to know the past is only
possible, as it was for Benjamin, by redeeming the debris of cast­off
commodities through which that world lived, but whereas Benjamin
believed a profane illumination might awaken the critic from
nightmares of exploitation that made commodity culture, Tyler simply
extends the logic of commodification over that history. In both
paradigms, the logic of the commodity is reflected and contested
through the practice of collage. Artists and critics mirror consumers,
choosing and arranging ready­made materials, and this fact explains
why collage is so important not only as a practice of artists, but also
as a coordinating metaphor to grasp the struggles and problems of
identity and everyday life in popular literature.
If both artists and critics are rummaging through the flotsam
and jetsam of commodity culture, the objects all around us, many
things that were once trash, or existed as something other than
commodities (stories or melodies, genomes or images), or just simply
trash that one might reuse, are now commodities in their own right.
While Benjamin sees the storm of progress giving the angel the
possibility of choosing any object, a way to “seize hold of a memory
as it flashes up at a moment of danger,” (“Theses” 255) those
objectified memories are now themselves commodities, and subject to
control and exchange, valorized just at Tyler envisions it. The whole
shared cultural past is being repackaged, the trash hauled back in to
be sold again, and this has created a crises for artists now that even
208 Banash

business seems to be taking the readymade seriously, turning and

eating its own tail as it were. Today the dada appropriation of images
and logos in photomontage would be possible only if Hannah Höch
and Raoul Hausmann could afford the images, and only if the owners
were willing to sell. It is the commodification of trash, the whole
spectacle corporations make of our object world that is at the heart of
Don DeLillo. In his postwar epic Underworld, DeLillo invokes the
very landfills of Coupland’s fantasy theme park, and waste manager
Brian Glassic muses that “the landfill showed him smack­on how the
waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the
sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted
ardently and then did not.”28 The waste managers are thus the “seers”
and “adepts” of the waste world who want to “make a park one day
out of every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire” (185).
Another waste executive goes further, arguing that landfills
themselves are the attraction: “The scenery of the future. Eventually
the only scenery left. The more toxic the waste, the greater the effort
and expense a tourist will be willing to tolerate in order to visit the
site” (286). The two key characters of Underworld are thus the waste
management executive and an artist of collage and assemblage named
Klara Sax. While Nick Shay manages the waste, it is Klara who turns
it into collaged assemblages and installations animated seemingly by
critique, but ultimately by the most profound nostalgia.
First a painter in the 1950s, Klara, much like Robert
Rauschenberg, begins to incorporate objects and ephemera into her
canvases until they are something like combines or outright
assemblages and, as she explains to a younger painter, “They called
me the Bag Lady” (392). Gesturing at the assemblage and found
object movements of the sixties and seventies, Klara explains: “There
were a few of us then. We took junk and saved it for art. Which
sounds nobler than it was” (393). If the waste dump is the underworld
of consumer culture, the collage is its mirror, a dialectical image of
the shopper and the wasteful consumer, the work of art encoding both
 Nostalgia 209

the process of selection and enshrining the cast­off status of

disposable objects in a world of planned obsolescence. Not content
with the small objects of everyday life, Klara’s final project is an epic
conjunction of the assisted­readymade and landscape art. Contracting
with the United States Air Force, she takes an entire airplane
graveyard in the desert of Arizona, painting hundreds of planes that
once carried atomic bombs. While one might first read this as a kind
of critical and utopian moment of turning swords into ploughshares,
the explanation DeLillo provides for her turns to a kind of nostalgia
that clearly animates his entire book–and it is a strange nostalgia for a
world of tremendous violence and power. Explaining the project to a
TV interviewer, Klara remembers that during the late 1950s, she saw
the B­52 atomic bombers flying off the coast of Maine: “I have to tell
you those lights were a complex sensation. Those planes on
permanent alert, ever present you know,” and she connects this to
“feeling a sense of awe, a child’s sleepy feeling of mystery and
danger and beauty” (75). In 1992, the aged artist begins her work on
these decommissioned cold war planes, and she calls the monumental
undertaking “Long Tall Sally” after a pin­up image she discovered
painted on the nose of a plane, but clearly also a reference to the Little
Richard song, thus invoking the desires and fears of the whole age
played out in the riotous music of sexual desire coupled to the deathly
turn­ons of a world poised on the brink of nuclear destruction. For
Klara, though, the horror of the death machines she paints, or the
racist, violently sexy world the conjunction of the pin­up image and
Little Richard conjure up, do not become the critical force their very
explanation would suggest. Instead, Klara expresses a poignant
nostalgia:

Now that power is in shatters or tatters and now that those Soviet borders
don’t even exist in the same way, I think we understand, we look back, we
see ourselves more clearly, and them as well. Power meant something
thirty, forty years ago. It was stable, it was focused, it was a tangible thing.
210 Banash

It was greatness, danger, terror, all those things. And it held us together, the
Soviets and us. Maybe it held the world together. You could measure things.
You could measure hope and you could measure destruction. Not that I
want to bring it back. It’s gone, good riddance. But the fact is. (76)

The narrator tells us that “she seemed to lose her line of argument
here,” (76) and it is no wonder. Articulating her desire and the pull of
the past in these objects, she comes to the irrationality of her desire,
but the affect of the nostalgia is palpable in all she says. She longs for
a world that “held us together,” and in the terrifying death machines
she feels a longing for a safe and comprehensible world, the desire for
a maternal, enfolding innocence here written not on a childhood sled,
but instead on the epic corpse of the cold war itself.
And yet, just after this, Klara again sums up her work on
“Long Tall Sally”: “What I really want to get at is the ordinary thing,
the ordinary life behind the thing,” (77) but of course the thing isn’t
so readily available, enmeshed in a complex matrix of ideology and
desire, caught in the objects of commodity fetishism and profound
nostalgia. To evoke this world, DeLillo, like Fitch and Coupland,
gives us the image of the readymade and the metaphor of the collage
artist, but the desires of these figures are in their deepest affect not so
much critical, though superficially they might well be. The animating
force comes from the deepest wells of longing and nostalgia.
Jean Baudrillard outlines the movement of twentieth­century
art “towards an analytical expression of the object, in other words,
shedding the mask of figuration in order to find behind appearances
an analytical truth for the object and for the world” (“Art” 51). The
force of art is no longer one of illusion and enchantment, but a
profound desire to rend the veils of representation and put us in touch
with the object itself, and if an abstract expressionist canvas might
achieve this goal by forcing us to see the painting itself as an object,
not a representation, how much more direct to take objects ready­
made and simply present them. But why should we want to cross
 Nostalgia 211

“through the looking­glass of representation” (52) as Baudrillard

imagines it? In part, as Kane, Warhol, King, and DeLillo show us, the
modern relationships to objects are profoundly different, for the
commodity casts spells and illusions even more seductive than those
of art itself. The ready­made elements of assemblage and collages
wrestle with the reality of a disposable culture and the longing for
what is past.
While ready­made objects selected new from a catalog or
rescued from a trash heap may well escape the illusions of figuration,
they are still enmeshed in a web of commodity fetishism. As soon as
they are born into the world, they promise us a total redemption: to
heal us body and soul, to make us eternally young, and to transform
us into our best, most beautiful selves. They project us constantly into
a utopian future of unlimited possibility. What always escapes the
commodity is the present moment. Finding the spell of ownership is
not enough to make these promises a reality, the market sells us the
moment of the promise over and over again, and we return to the
shelves. Is it any surprise that in prewar America, the Sears, Roebuck
and Co. catalog was called the “Wish Book”? Don DeLillo captures
this moment so beautifully in White Noise as Jack Gladney rushes
through a shopping spree: “There was always another store, three
floors, eight floors, basement full of cheese graters and paring knives
… I began to grow in value and self­regard. I filled myself out, found
new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed.
Brightness settled around me.”29 But once we pass through the portals
of the point­of­purchase, all evaporates, like Cinderella’s midnight
coach turning back into a mere pumpkin, and we find ourselves with
less and less youth or beauty, but more and more shoes and Hoovers
and cheese graters. Yet, just as mysteriously, the magic always fails
us, and we so lightly throw these things away to try the promise all
over again, and thus grow our monumental Fresh Kills. Eternally the
commodity escapes the present, for its promise can only exist in the
future, or perversely, in a mythic past. If again and again our present
212 Banash

fails us, and we become suspicious of the promise, we can reject the
future and long for the past, and the older we are, the more this is a
temptation. While our next purchase might not make us whole,
perhaps we can reach out for the magic of our own youth, or even the
youth of our parents or our grandparents by grasping and reanimating
their objects. We can unearth the objects of the past and gather them
in a magic circle, reactivating their promises, and because so many
objects exist without decay or mortality, their eternal persistence
through time is the guarantee of our hope. In the immortality of the
object, we can comfort our decay, confusion, and feeling of
fragmentation. In this moment of nostalgia, their style itself is a
charm, and since the promises of the past took different styles, offered
different fantasies, their seductions are all the more powerful. For
Americans in particular, the future promise, present failure, and
nostalgic force of commodities are tellingly illustrated by the rise of
the automotive tailfin, its demise, and its nostalgic force, captured in
both popular kitsch and fine art.
Though not quite on the scale of “Long Tall Sally,” the Ant
Farm’s Cadillac Ranch is in all other respects so close to DeLillo’s
imagination one wonders if he had it in mind for Klara Sax. Created
in 1974 just outside Amarillo, Texas, it is a work that combines the
machine and the landscape in an ostensibly critical statement that is
really powered by profound nostalgia. Stanley Marsh III, the eccentric
“Helium Barron” and TV station owner was also an art collector. He
asked the Ant Farm to create something for his ranch. In their book
Automerica, the Ant Farmers explain how, growing up in the 1950s
with tailfins, this “pure image” of the commodity style left its mark
on them: “The 1959 Cadillac had fins that were forty­two inches off
the ground. The image was imprinted subliminally.”30 The tailfin
signifies pure desire, gratuitous excess divorced from function.
Certainly the Ant Farmers share Tom Wolfe’s sentiment, when he
writes in The Kandy­Kolored Tangerine­Flake Streamline Baby, “they
are an inspiration, if you will, a wonderful fantasy extension of the
 Nostalgia 213

curved line, and since the car in America is half fantasy anyway, a
kind of baroque extension of the ego.”31 In its time, Harley Earl’s
tailfin was the promise of a utopian future of automotive power that
would soar with the consumer ego, powering the driver into a jet­age
future of total omnipotence.
With the financial support of Marsh, the Ant Farmers
gleefully began buying cars: “It was a white­trash dream come true,
buying and driving old Cadillacs on the windswept plains of the Texas
Panhandle” (126). They planted ten of them in a row, at the same
angle as the Ancient pyramids, and created what they describe simply
as a “roadside attraction” (124).
While the tailfin is the inspiration for this work, and clearly a
fetish of both postwar culture and an object of nostalgia for
Americans even now, what makes Cadillac Ranch work is its perfect
balance of fetish and critique. One could imagine the artists doing
something quite different to express all of this, perhaps creating a
giant tailfin, or building some very different sort of monument.
Commercial artists of all stripes exploit an endless market in nostalgia
with many of the same elements. However, at every turn, Cadillac
Ranch enmeshes nostalgic desire with a very pointed and unvarnished
invocation of death so similar to Klara Sax’s B­52 graveyard.
The title itself conjures up the romantic myth of the American
West, the ranch with its ubiquitous cowboy, but certainly it was in
large part cars that killed off that particular way of life, leaving the
cowboy as little more than a ghostly image. The artists could have
simply cut the tailfins from the cars and presented them as art objects
totally divorced from function, but they avoided this. Instead, they
have planted the cars nose in the ground. Indeed, it seems as if the
overblown Cadillacs are actually being driven into the earth,
swallowed up, surely a signifier of death. After all, think of how
differently this monument would be had the cars been pointing nose
up, perhaps on launch pads, recalling the jet airplanes that first
inspired the man who brought us tailfins. Instead of leaping into the
214 Banash

Ant Farm, Cadillac Ranch, 1974. Site­specific installation, Amarillo,

Texas. © Ant Farm (Lord, Marquez, Michels) 1974, 2004. Photo: Bud
Lee, courtesy University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and
Pacific Film Archive.
 Nostalgia 215

air, which is what those fins always suggested, it seems as if these

beautiful machines have literally fallen out of the sky. If the dream of
automobility was our desire to leap into the air, it ultimately just
wouldn’t fly. Here we see the dream post­impact. Simply with the
gesture of burying the cars in the earth, the artists both fetishize the
tailfin and predict the ultimate image of a literal death drive, taking it
out of its present and its failed future, and redeeming it for our eternal
nostalgia.
Just as important to the entire work as its arrangement is its
location. Set against the impossibly large skies of the Texas plains, the
cars are dwarfed by the natural sublime. They don’t seem large at all.
Their lines take on a particular meaning against that sky. By the early
1990s, the sprawl of Amarillo had caught up to the ranch and
obliterated that pristine horizon, so the artists had to move the whole
thing several miles further away to keep the sky. Against that empty
horizon, it feels as though all civilization has ended and only the
rotting hulks of the cars remain, perhaps the perpetrators of the
encroaching desolation. And yet, the cars remain a roadside attraction.
Those who visit the site are not there for criticism, but warm
themselves in the glow of the automotive dream of unlimited flight
that still evokes desire, though its deathly end is clear.
While the use of ready­made materials begins with the most
critical and self­conscious movements of the avant­grade, as the
twentieth century has passed, those gestures often mutate into
something else. Avant­garde artists and critics have emphasized the
critical work of cutting up the ready­made materials of culture for so
long that it is sometimes difficult to imagine that a readymade might
be anything but critical. I fully realized the power of nostalgia the first
time I saw the Tape­Beatles perform Good Times: An Expanded
Cinema Presentation for Three Projectors and Sound in 2004. The
Tape­Beatles performed their polyvison spectacle in a university
auditorium, using three 16 mm projectors and a wealth of ready­made
images they had culled from industrial and educational films of the
216 Banash

1950s and 1960s in particular. As the presentation progressed, lurid

and striking images of education and mass production flared up in
remarkable and striking patterns, the fantastic, fading colors flashing
over the three screens. It seemed as though the whole postwar dream
of automation and mechanical perfection was unreeling before one’s
eyes, and at the level of just the images and their montages, certainly
this was critique–the beauty of the automation daring one to become
machine. It was a devastating look at the dream of mass production
that ruled the imagination of both the left and the right throughout the
postwar period. Yet, as I sat just behind the busy projectionists,
something else overcame me, and my eyes were drawn away from the
images and sounds of the screen and to the performers themselves.
The projectors the Tape­Beatles were using were not unlike
those from chilhood, and as the performance progressed, so did an
overwhelming feeling. It began to emerge from the characteristic tick­
tick­tick­tick­tick, tripping along as the shutters created that
unmistakably tinny rhythm of film projected in the room with its
audience. I was transported back to my earliest days in school
watching films about reefs and forests. The critique the images on the
screen were making so eloquently in their radical juxtaposition was
overwhelmed by a profound feeling, which at first I couldn’t name.
As the performance progressed, the Tape­Beatles themselves were
furiously busy, queuing up the short films that accompanied the
images on the main projectors. Suddenly, the film in the central
projector snapped, and the entire Tape­Beatles performance was
halted as they made splices to repair the damaged film. Slowly,
gently, the projectionist bent down–no longer concerned with the
rhythm of the spectacle, and ever so delicately spliced together the
brittle, fifty­ or sixty­year­old film, and in that instant I could
suddenly articulate what I felt so strongly. I knew this wasn’t only the
critical cutting gesture of critique, but also a heartbreaking love trying
to keep hold of the past.
GLEANING: EVERYDAY LIFE IN COLLAGE CULTURE

The distinction between being and having produces terrible anxieties

for critics of consumer culture. For the young Karl Marx, it is the key
difference between a real human paradise and a hellish state of
alienation, and in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844, he indicts the capitalist world for preferring the possession of
commodities to the cultivation of human senses. Objects themselves
are not the problem, and indeed Marx claims that “only through the
objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness
of subjective human sensibility … either cultivated or brought into
being.”1 The only way to understand and cultivate what we are is to
work on the world, to manifest what we are in objects and practices.
In a rational world, every individual could test his or her being, and
the success or failure of that labor reveals the truth of each person.
For instance, if one wants to enjoy art, one must work to become “an
artistically cultivated person” (105). But such a becoming is by no
means guaranteed. For instance, “if through a living expression of
yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person,
then your love is impotent–a misfortune” (105). Achieving a state of
being is so valuable because it reveals a hard­fought truth. Capitalism,
however, makes a black magic out of money that “is the general
confounding and compounding of all things,” or simply “the world
upside down” (105). With enough money, anyone can avoid the labor
of being for the ease of having. With money, “what I am and am
capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly,
but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women” (103). The
218 Banash

labor of becoming is exchanged for the ease of having, but the price is
the terrible alienation of a lie.
The problem of being and having is not unique to just money,
but becomes the underlying problem of all commodities. In Capital,
Marx succinctly defines the problem of the commodity form,
maintaining that “the relations connecting the labor of one individual
with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between
individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations
between persons and social relations between things.”2 The form
through which we exchange objects hides the social relationships that
produced them, negating the being of labor and asserting that the
value is simply inherent in the object, something we can buy without
ever accounting for the people who produced them or our real
relationships to them. Every object we have in the form of a
commodity is a negation of those who made it, and we mistake what
are actually profoundly human modes of being for the facile
satisfactions of having.
Marx’s fear is well illustrated in the fate of music. Since the
ancient world, to hear music, one had to either find a musician or
become one. While paintings or poems could be bought and sold,
music remained a practice. Longer than most other arts, it remained
difficult to commodify, and though manufacturers of pianos and
publishers of sheet music flourished in the nineteenth century, one
still needed musicians in order to hear music. While one could hang a
painting on the wall and never have to meet the painter or see a brush,
to make music still meant immediate, practical activity–either being,
or being with, a musician. Once something exists as a thing divorced
from the social practice of its production, the social dimensions,
responsibilities, and human potentials become invisible or impossible.
So long as music remained a practice, to hear it, one had to engage in
profoundly social relationships; one could not simply fetishize an
object.
 Gleaning 219

Evan Eisenberg recounts how during the nineteenth century,

the daughters of the bourgeoisie were often the musicians: “A stack of
difficult scores would fool nobody, since the ladies were expected to
exhibit their skills after dinner. Some rich men’s daughters played so
well that their teachers fell in love with them, but that was not what
the rich men had in mind. They would rather have bought the music
in bulk and kept the musicians away.”3 This striking vignette
emphasizes the unruly potentials of social relationships that cannot be
reduced to an exchange of things, and the hopes of the crass or
paranoid consumer–the father–who would rather have the things than
the people. As Eisenberg puts it, “The fact that most art took the form
of objects was convenient. It implied that culture, too, could be had
for a price. A rigorous liberal­arts education was not really necessary,
and neither was any application of mind to works of art; all you
needed were the objects” (11). By 1906, music had become a thing
with the rise of sound recordings, and one could amass a vast
collection of music without ever picking up a musical instrument,
meeting a musician, or cultivating any musical sense. The fate of
music is emblematic of almost every object, experience, and practice
under capitalism. By the turn of the millennium, the rich could
happily dispose of the pretense for art and culture; simply possessing
artless but expensive things would be sufficient.4
Commodities and money make it possible to substitute having
for being, but the real fear is that the force of having actively
interferes with the cultivation of new, deeper, and more human
dimensions of being, and, certainly, there is at least some truth to this.
And yet, inventive people have always found ways to develop senses
and practices within commodity culture that are much more than
brutal, one­dimensional modes of having. To some small degree, it is
almost impossible not to do this, but in this final chapter I am
particularly interested in extreme cases where, on the terrain of the
commodity, people have managed to make meanings and engage in
220 Banash

practices that develop or transform their human senses through new

relationships to the objects of commodity culture.
The people who make the most inventive uses of the ready­
made resources of the culture are often those who are somehow
excluded from the economic power of having. Thus, I think their
myriad practices are most actively captured through the metaphor of
gleaning.5 Since the ancient world, agrarian economies gave the
poorest people the right to glean: to enter fields they did not own and
collect what had been left behind after the harvest. With excruciating
effort, these gleaners picked up what was left–the small, the bruised,
the fallen, the cast­off–and made life of it. In our economy of over­
production, planned obsolescence, and waste, people glean not in
fields, but in the streets, junkyards, dumps, and trash cans. They labor
not in fields, but inhabit and make meaning in urban spaces they do
not own with the ready­made resources they find at hand. Out of the
cast­off, the readymade, or the spaces they find, they cultivate deeply
personal expressions that transcend having, expand their human
sensuousness, and sometimes assemble a politics of radical critique.
While Citizen Kane represents the apex of the desire to possess, the
soul of the gleaner is surely Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Thinker­Tinker
Ellison begins his story at its conclusion, after the invisible man has
tried every possible avenue to make a life. He finds that the small
town establishment, higher education, Harlem, as well as white New
York, corporations, the medical profession, and even the Communist
party, have all failed him, for none of these could recognize his
humanity since he was black and all these organizations were based
on endemic racism. Since both black and white people in the culture
refused to see him or themselves, he embraces the metaphor of
invisibility and abandons his hopes for a career, a job, or even the
designation as being human. The invisible man claims: “I gave up all
that, along with my apartment, and my old way of life.”6 Embracing
 Gleaning 221

the interstices of culture and space, he lives “rent­free in a building

rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off
and forgotten during the nineteenth century” (5–6). He claims this
wasted and abandoned space, working to redefine himself, reminding
his readers that “it is incorrect to assume that, because I’m invisible
and live in a hole, I am dead.” Instead, he insists: “Call me Jack­the­
Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation” (6).
The invisible man’s hibernation is, however, neither sleepy
nor dark. He has spent much of his time installing “1369 lights” (7).
He claims: “A junk man I know, a man of vision, has supplied me
with wire and sockets … I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of
it” (7). From the cast­off junk of electrical modernism, the invisible
man satisfies his need for “brighter light.” He plans to wire the
ceiling, all four walls, and even the floor. “Just how that will go, I
don’t know. Yet when you have lived invisible as long as I have you
develop a certain ingenuity” (7). Through abandoned space and junk,
the invisible man is transforming himself. He does not compare
himself to artists, politicians or even revolutionaries. Instead, he
maintains: “I am in that great American tradition of tinkers. That
makes me kin to Ford, Edison, and Franklin. Call me, since I have a
theory and a concept, a ‘thinker­tinker’” (7). The tinker is a
profoundly physical metaphor that implies having while going beyond
it–the objects are important only for inventing, trying actively to
create something new. Though a tinker needs objects with which to
work, it is the work that matters–having and being.
The “thinker­tinker” is not yet a figure of radical politics,
organized or effective resistance, or even protest, but rather one of
immediate and personal experiment and cultivation. Perhaps what the
thinker­tinker cobbles together will explode into larger effects that
reverberate through a society, but it is far more likely they won’t–or
rarely in the ways their developers imagined they would. For every
Franklin stove, there is a failed Twain typewriter, and though Thomas
Edison invented the phonograph, he never imagined that its principle
222 Banash

use, success, and transformative force would be musical. Tinkers are

not always gleaners, but surprisingly often the two activities seem to
feed back into one another. The gleaner finds what is ready­to­hand,
while the tinker toys with it, finding new possibilities in it. Since what
is ready­to­hand is more often than not damaged, it demands
playfulness and invention–an active engagement that goes well
beyond mere possession.
Gleaning and tinkering are perhaps best characterized as what
Michel de Certeau names tactics.7 In The Practice of Everyday Life,
de Certeau does not foment revolution. Instead, he seeks to
understand how ordinary people subjected to the overwhelming
demands and constraints of modern technocracy and consumer culture
manage to make meaning in their lives without becoming the
mindless, fascistic zombies imagined by everyone from Matthew
Arnold and Theodor Adorno to Bret Easton Ellis. What is striking
about this long tradition of critique is its pessimistic emphasis on
large corporations, government, education, and mass media to
completely overwhelm and define everyday life to such an extent that
resistance is impossible. In Arnold’s, Adorno’s, or Ellis’s terms, the
monolithic edifice is so successful that there is simply no human left
to resist the machine. More subtly, and less radically, de Certeau
thinks through this situation from the side of individuals subjected to
these structures and forces, and for the most part, he agrees that these
are the dominant, controlling forces of our lives. He maintains: “I call
a ‘strategy’ the calculus of force­relationships which becomes
possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise,
a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment.’
A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper
(propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an
exterior distinct from it” (xix).
For de Certeau, strategies control spaces and bodies, forcing
patterns of behavior on those who operate inside their territories. And
indeed, those territories are now vast, as almost every urban space is
 Gleaning 223

completely owned and controlled by corporations and their media.

Yet, de Certeau does not think that those who are subjected to these
strategies of organization and control are powerless. Though weak
and subjected, the relatively powerless individual can nonetheless
employ the tactic: “The place of a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic
insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it
over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at
its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare
its expansions, and secure independence with respect to
circumstances” (xix).
The entire narrative of Invisible Man might well be read as
the narrator’s futile struggle to make himself an accepted part of the
strategies of the powerful, and the concluding prologue explains his
turn toward a life of tactics. Failing, for instance, in the case of his
education, his attempt to work for a manufacturer, and his indictment
by the Communist party, he finds that the strategies of these powerful
institutions are too much for him, and their endemic racism
irresistible, turning him into a one­dimensional tool, a would­be
zombie to work out their institutional desires. Fleeing to his
abandoned hole, tinkering and waiting, he is weak, but de Certeau
maintains, “the weak must continually turn to their own ends forces
alien to them” (xix). Thus the invisible man occupies space that he
has no recognized claim to, poaches electricity from Monopolated
Light and Power, gleans and tinkers with the cast­offs and junk of the
culture, crafting for himself things and ideas that might have a force,
that have profoundly affected his everyday life, but remain untried
as larger, potentially transformative strategies.

Evasion, Freegans, and Rat Patrol

The place of the tactic, as de Certeau claims, belongs to the other,
though often that other is not institutionally excluded by forces like
racism, but for reasons ranging from serious political objections to
unprincipled hedonism, eschewing the rewards and demands of
224 Banash

strategic integration for the pleasures of tactics. Thus it is a fittingly

unnamed youth who lived for three years in the heart of opulent
suburbs and strip malls around the West Coast and beyond, poaching
and gleaning everything, avoiding the monotony and boredom of
work, and cultivating personal pleasures and sensibilities. Originally
self­published as a homemade zine, the author’s experiences have
been anthologized in a book entitled Evasion.
Graduating from high school, his parents quickly realize that
their son has no investment in pursuing his education or beginning a
career. He spends his time picking through dumpsters, skate boarding,
and preaching a militant veganism. Though raised in a life of
privilege, and strategically chosen to be its heir, he rejects it. Like
Ellison’s invisible man, the anonymous author of Evasion takes
advantage of institutional strategies, hijacking their products and
spaces for his own uses and pleasures. Unlike Ellison’s hero, he is
born white and wealthy in California, and uses his youth, education,
and cultural capital to ruse with institutional power–he is invisible
because the strategic operators always assume they see him: “I
sponged off the luxuriance and took advantage of the loopholes in La
Jolla’s opulence. I felt tough and sneaky, like a well­dressed tramp in
deep cover across enemy lines.”8 His disguises merge with the
assumptions of strategic operators: “My guise was indistinguishable
from the real thing, so at hotels I was ‘kid on vacation with parents,’
in cafes I was ‘studying college student,’ and though it’s difficult to
look stately waist­deep in a dumpster, I was clean­shaven, and I
always smiled” (265). The sense of life as a game pervades the book,
down to the description of his suburban home town: the “[m]ost
common urbanite response to seeing my town for the first
time–‘Looks like a board game!’” (121). Playing this game by
breaking the rules, he claims, “the big, crazy urban chaos and
suburban sprawl … began to look suspiciously close to a big
playground” (2).
 Gleaning 225

Evasion begins with a kind of manifesto, in which a

collective but undefined “we” makes sweeping generalizations: “Our
philosophies evolved–from general dislike of work, to the feeling of
exploitation, then seeing the American way of life for what it is and
turning our backs on it” (4). The most viscerally described aspects of
this critique have to do with the waste and the absurdities of
overproduction, and though he never explicitly states it, dumpster­
diving seems to be the genesis of the author’s transformation from
slacker to anarchist. At first simply curious about what consumer
culture consigns to the trash, he begins to realize that he might live on
what suburban stores waste. Evasion contains vivid and frequent
catalogs of what might be pulled from the trash: boxes of cookies,
cereal, bagels, bread, vitamins, vegetables, fruits, candy, books,
records, electronics of all sorts. “The supermarket had a dumpster as
big as my house, full of fruits and vegetables. So I stopped paying for
food” (64). In The Waste Makers, Vance Packard’s 1959 indictment of
consumer culture, he points out that this kind of waste had to be
taught to American consumers by overheated production and massive
advertising campaigns: “What was needed was strategies that would
make Americans in large numbers into voracious, wasteful,
compulsive consumers–and strategies that would provide products
assuring such wastefulness.”9 Fifty years later, Evasion shows those
lessons of the 1950s were well learned.
The symbolic economy of trash is particularly fascinating to
the nameless author of Evasion, and it is part of the absurdity the
book constantly laughs at. He explains how trash is abject to the
culture at large, but not at all in its reality: “Preaching salvation
through trash, I was up against a lifetime of upper­middle­class
conditioning. ‘You’ll get sick and die eating that food,’ they said. The
living­dead of the ‘work force’ giving health advice. By what logic
was food deadly the moment it entered a trash bag, or passed through
the back door?” (65). His parents, friends, and especially the
employees who catch him in their dumpsters are disgusted with him,
226 Banash

sincerely repelled: “Nonbelievers had to be dealt with militantly–like

my parents. I would offer them food without revealing its source. Or
sneakily cook them entire dumpster meals … unknowingly defeating
their own arguments as they ate ‘garbage’ … and loved it” (66).
While the horror of eating garbage perhaps makes some sense, the
rage of employees who find him in the trash is more troubling:

There is the odd paradox–the casualness with which they will throw
something into the dumpster, and the lengths they go to to protect it once
it’s there. How an innocent and harmless act–dumpster diving–will be
confronted by greedy shopkeepers, store managers, and employees with
scathing words, rage, and violence … me in the dumpster, them shaking
their fist from the back door. Get a job? You’re calling the police? The only
people who went to greater extremes in the name of trash than us were
those who threw it all away. (72)

There is a poignant irony in these encounters, and it conjures

up Freud’s observation in Civilization and Its Discontents, that
“[a]fter primal man had discovered that it lay in his own hands,
literally, to improve his lot on earth by working, it cannot have been a
matter of indifference to him whether another man worked with or
against him. The other man acquired the value for him of a fellow­
worker.”10 However, consumer culture overproduces to the point that
work is merely for the sake of waste, a horrifying and masochistic
culture of overproduction unmasked by the kid gleaning in the alley
dumpster. Seeing the culture through its excreta and realizing its
absurdity, the anonymous author of Evasion reflects that “when I walk
away to visit the next dumpster, or read a book, or do as I please, I
look back at the man straightening his tie and returning to work.
That’s victory” (73).
This tactical victory, however, is only possible when our
dumpster diver is undercover in the wealthy suburbs. Freight­hopping
across the country, he gleans and squats in college towns and rich
 Gleaning 227

resorts without a care. However, when a ride on a boxcar traps him in

East Saint Louis, he discovers things are not so easy for the truly
poor. Finding himself in the ghetto train yard, he initially thinks, “I’d
survived 2,793 miles on only $4, I’d survive East St. Louis” (181).
But the tactics he uses to live in white wealth are not applicable: “I
soon understood what was meant by ‘the other side of the tracks’–the
side where you have to pay” (182). Unable to glean or shoplift
anything, he is forced to buy a ticket out on Greyhound, back to the
privileged enclaves of waste to which his youth and race provide
access. The book ends with our hero squatting in a resort hotel:
“Poolside, I thought about adventure, youth, other towns with bigger
palm trees, seizing the day, life, love, regret. I reclined in the cushy
lawn chair, staring into the sky, drinking fruit juice. Well, it all just
seemed like I had won, you know?” (270). His victory, though, is
deeply personal. Realizing the absurdities of consumerism, he refuses
to participate, living instead on the margins, gleaning and poaching
his way to leisure that is doubtless both pleasant and quietist. The
hero of Evasion thus remains something like the invisible man, living
in the interstices of culture, creating a new set of values, and working
out a critique of the dominant culture, but his alternatives remain only
potentials, unrealized by others, and his life practice has little or no
force for a community. The young hero is a thinker, but not yet much
of a tinker, unable to rewire the world for a larger group that might
sustain alternative ways of coping with the injustices and absurdities
of consumer culture.
The punk youth cultures of the 1970s and 80s have developed
more politically in recent years, offering radical critiques of the mass
production of food and rampant consumerism with collective
practices dedicated to alternative modes of living.11 Unlike the
individual reinventions of Evasion, groups like New York’s Freegans
and Chicago’s Rat Patrol offer a politically charged practice of
collective gleaning. The figure of the rat becomes a totem animal, for
rats have always lived by gleaning the excess from human cultures,
228 Banash

and in a playful transvaluation, the rat becomes a fable for a new way
of living. In their manifesto, “Rebel in the Ashcan,” the Rat Patrol
proclaims: “The rat is a guerrilla. He attacks swiftly and disappears
into the jungle whence he came. Do not look for you will not find.
Learn from him: Travel the alleys, stay in the shadows, live with
trash, be a Rebel In The Ashcan!”12 The group has taken this literally,
gleaning and rebuilding abandoned and discarded bicycles, both
reducing traffic and redeeming trash. They have even gone so far as to
try and ship crates of discarded bicycles to Africa. Similarly, a loosely
organized collective has named themselves freegans. On their
website, they maintain, “As freegans we forage instead of buying to
avoid being wasteful consumers ourselves, to politically challenge the
injustice of allowing vital resources to be wasted while multitudes
lack basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter, and to reduce
the waste going to landfills and incinerators which are
disproportionately situated within poor, non­white neighborhoods,
where they cause elevated levels of cancer and asthma.”13 Much like
the invisible man, freegans glean as a way to avoid participating in a
culture of unethical privilege and waste, but their strategies make for
odd and difficult lives that demand fantastic self­sacrifice and
commitment. In a New York Times feature story, freegan Madeline
Nelson explains, “It’s always hard to give up class privilege. But
freegans would argue that the capitalist system is not sustainable.
You’re exploiting resources.” She adds, “Most people work 40­plus
hours a week at jobs they don’t like to buy things they don’t need.”14
These modern gleaners look for ways to live without participating,
hibernating from the crush of capitalism, and thus their practices are a
far cry from the organized and collective modes of agrarian gleaning
from which these contemporary practices draw their metaphorical
name.
 Gleaning 229

From Ruth to Chaplin’s Tramp

The origins of gleaning are found in scarcity and poverty–and those
deep associations with desperation and submission are enmeshed in
the abject reactions so many have to dumpster divers and other trash
pickers. Gleaning is a practice seemingly as old as agriculture itself,
and this ancient, stooped figure underpins our contemporary, urban
metaphors. Its most iconic incarnation is found in the book of Ruth,
the Old Testament’s searing account of rural famine and desperation.
Set in the days of Israel’s judges, the world of Ruth is one of wars,
famine, and flight. Driven by hunger, Naomi, her husband, and their
two sons flee Israel, hoping to find solace in Moab. They settle in this
foreign land for about ten years, and both Naomi’s sons marry
Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. However, Moab proves just as
barren and dangerous as Bethlehem, and Naomi’s husband and sons
die, leaving her alone with two young daughters­in­law. Naomi
decides to return to Bethlehem, and she urges Ruth and her sister to
remain with their Moabite mothers and seek new husbands. Orpah
does stay, but Ruth refuses, saying: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to
return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and
where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and
thy God my God.”15 This is a profound gesture of faith and love, and
a leap into abject poverty and dependence.
Arriving in Bethlehem with nothing, Ruth has no choice but
to try and support her mother­in­law by going into the fields of
Naomi’s kinsman: “Let me now go to the field, and glean ears of corn
after him in whose sight I shall find grace” (2.2) In this act of
humbling submission, Ruth works diligently though she is in constant
danger of being raped.16 Ruth’s willingness to risk everything in a
desperate choice is figured in her abject posture as a gleaner,
following behind the reapers, stooping to gather what is missed, lost,
or cast­off. In the end, Ruth does catch the eye of the wealthy Boaz,
and he takes her under his protection, ultimately marries her, and
makes her the grandmother of King David. Her faith and humility
230 Banash

have transformed her life, and just as she has gathered the cast­off and
forgotten, so Boaz has redeemed her. The most important themes of
the book of Ruth are faith and redemption, since it is Ruth’s faith in
her mother­in­law and her newly chosen God that are at the heart of
her story. Certainly, too, the sparks of youth and sexual attraction fuel
Boaz’s espousal (like the nameless author of Evasion, youth helps
those in desperate straits), yet gleaning remains the enduring figure of
Ruth’s pathos and appeal, and that is the image that recurs most often
in poetry and art. Consider, for instance, John Keats’s “Ode to a
Nightingale,” in which the speaker dreams that “Perhaps the self­
same song that found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth, when,
sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn.”17 Keats
imagines the extremity of dislocation and vulnerability that Ruth has
come to signify so powerfully, though the Bible itself makes no
mention of such distress.
For the French painter Nicolas Poussin, Summer: Ruth and
Boaz is a field of golden wheat, a bright, shocking abundance of
wealth and prosperity. Boaz is clad in bright yellow and stands above
the kneeling Ruth, her prostrate figure that of both the gleaner and
supplicant–a gesture of submission, and it is this figure, painfully
kneeling, stooped, or bent that will define the classical figure of the
gleaner.
Though both stooping and reaching are backbreaking, in our
imagination they are profoundly different gestures. Somehow to reach
and pick becomes a movement of ease and aspiration while stooping
incarnates a gesture of defeat and desperation. In The Genealogy of
Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche discloses the orientational metaphors that
still inform our visceral comprehension of good and evil as high and
low. Throughout, the good is figured “high” and “noble,” while the
bad is “low” and “base.” Indeed, he maintains that “the noble man
lives for himself with trust and candour (gennaios, meaning ‘of noble
birth,’ stresses the nuance ‘upright’ and also probably ‘naive’).”18
Rather than upright, the bad man is the slave defining “the sphere of
 Gleaning 231

Jean Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857. Musee d’Orsay, Paris,

France. © RMN­Grand Palais, Art Resource, New York.
232 Banash

the common man, of the low people” (20). While ancient rituals of
stark violence and physical defeat lurk within these figures, for
modernity, the more palpable image of the base man is the beggar,
and it is Charlie Chaplin that most forcefully replays all these
postures in an urbanized world of abundance and abjection.
In the ancient, agrarian world, gleaners were almost always
women, and, as Agnès Varda points out, they were rarely alone.19
Throughout the history of painting, groups of women move through
the fields behind the male reapers. We see them again and again in
magnificent works like French painter Jean­François Millet’s Les
Glaneuses. They are lit by dramatic sun, enfolded in rolling green
fields, and though stooped in work they are draped in flowing clothes.
There is no such color for Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, who appears in
grainy black­and­white; his ill­fitting black jacket, small black hat,
and oversized shoes are more than a bit ridiculous. He is a denizen of
what F. Scott Fitzgerald describes in The Great Gatsby as the
nightmare of a modern pastoral, “a fantastic farm where ashes grow
like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes
take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally,
with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already
crumbling through the powdery air.”20 It is just this hopeless, black­
and­white landscape, framed in a long shot of claustrophobic alleys,
which introduces us to the tramp, that ashen figure wandering into the
foreground as garbage literally falls on his head in Chaplin’s first
feature­length film, The Kid.21
Chaplin’s feature film, much like the story of Ruth and The
Invisible Man, dramatizes the horror of a world where amidst
abundance one might lose everything. Like these narratives, there is
something mythic in it, as “the kid” in the film is a foundling. His
desperately poor, single mother leaves him in a wealthy family’s car,
wrapped in swaddling, awaiting a better life. Before he can be found,
thieves drive it away to those ashen alleys and throw the baby into the
 Gleaning 233

Production still from The Kid, Charlie Chaplin. © Roy Export S.A.S.

Production still from Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin. © Roy Export

234 Banash

trash. It is the tramp who will stoop down and pick him up, in that
gesture of submission that will redeem a life.
The ballet of Chaplin’s tramp is the tension between the poise
of the noble and the stoop of the oppressed. He strolls into the first
shot, his clothes a caricature of the dandy. He has the jacket, the hat,
and even the gloves of a gentleman, but nothing fits; all is ragged,
cast­off, clearly found. Yet he walks as though he is an elegant flâneur
even as his surroundings conspire to break his composure. Wandering
under a window, a heap of trash falls on his head, and his grace is
shattered into a series of jerks and shrugs. He regains himself and
walks on, leans against a wall, and tries to dance himself back into
dignity. He slowly removes his torn gloves as though they are a
gentleman’s evening wear, making a play of pulling at the tips of each
shredded finger as though they were the finest silk. He looks at them
and casts their shredded bits into the trash where no doubt they had
come from, here truly playing at being the rich man. He pats down his
pockets and produces the would­be luxury of a silver cigarette case in
the form dof a rusty tin, and, as he opens it, a close­up reveals the
sticky butt­ends of well­chewed cigars. He discriminately chooses
one and strikes a match, the man of leisure smoking and strolling
once again, but his composure cannot last. He hears the crying of a
baby, and looking across the alley to the trash, is disconcerted. He
walks over, and for the first time in the film, stoops down, his
composure broken again, no longer the dandy but the gleaner, picking
from the ashes a life cast away by desperation, chance, and greed.
Chaplin often connects the submission of the stoop to the
moment of human responsibility and connection, and picking up the
cast­off always shatters the tramp’s poses of gentility, but these are
always the moments that draw tears in his films, that seem the most
human. At the end of City Lights, the tramp stoops down, his ragged,
torn pants and awkward posture making him a figure of ridicule. He
bends into the gutter to glean a flower cast away by the lover who can
 Gleaning 235

no longer recognize him, and those on the street mock him. Yet in that
moment, the formerly blind girl motions to him and finally reaches
out her hand to him. As she grasps it, she feels the true identity of her
destitute benefactor. Only in breaking the pose of nobility through the
awkward hunch and stoop of the beggar is human connection possible
in the imagination of Chaplin.22
For Chaplin, the gesture of reaching, picking, is a fantasy. In
Modern Times,23 the tramp and the gamine are homeless, and they
find themselves exhausted and penniless, reduced to sitting on the
lawn of a modest house in a prototypical California suburb. They
watch the husband leave for work, his adoring wife waving to him,
and this sends the tramp into a reverie. He imagines life with the
gamine as a California idle. He reaches up through the window of his
well­appointed home and plucks an orange from the tree overflowing
with fruit. He dances to the back door, whistles for a cow, and slides a
pitcher under its udders. Amusingly enough, the cow simply fills the
pitcher–no need for the motions of milking here. As he waits, he idly
reaches above his head for the heavy clusters of grapes that are all but
tumbling through the door, absently plucking a few and savoring their
sweetness. This was always the lure of California, a Canaan of milk
and honey where the land provides without toil. For the tramp and the
gamine, it will remain as much a fiction as it was for Steinbeck’s
migrants. Charlie wakes to the reality of a cop standing above him,
and he and the gamine are forced to move on.

Gleaning a Home in Watts

It is tempting to imagine the tramp and the gamine wandering the
streets and perhaps finding themselves in southern Los Angeles, in the
residential district of Watts in 1930. Literally on the wrong side of the
tracks, perhaps they would have cast their eyes toward a bewildering
sight of hope and aspiration rising slowly into the sky. Here, at 1765
East 107th Street, Italian Immigrant Sabato “Sam” Rodia began
working in 1921, and he would continue for thirty­four years,
236 Banash

Sam Rodia, from William Hale’s film, The Towers, 1957. Couresy of
William B. Hale.
 Gleaning 237

gleaning the broken and cast­off into a series of monumentally lyric

towers that rise ten stories above the suburban ticky­tack that still
surrounds them as far as the eye can see. These gorgeous towers are
the work of an urban gleaner. The detritus of metropolis is here
gathered by one man, who stooped and bent to the ground to pick up
green pop bottles and broken plates, scraps of steel and sea shells,
wires and broken tiles and tools, whatever struck his fancy: a faucet
handle, a colander, a shattered teapot or a twisted steel chair. In Rodia,
the figures of the gleaner converge: like Ruth, he makes a leap of faith
in a strange country; like Chaplin’s tramp, his fantasy is one of pride
and the posture of the noble, but he spends his life stooping and
bending; like the invisible man, he is a great American tinker,
working without power tools or helpers, without rivets or welds, he
invents for himself the modern technique of ferrocement
construction–like all of them, he is never at home with himself.
Chaplin’s tramp is redeemed in sentiment, comedy, and grace:
his poverty is, as Salman Rushdie might have put it, “unreally real.”24
The cinematic lines and rhythms of his poverty soften and
sentimentalize it so the audience can stand it and laugh. Though the
tramp is always hungry, Chaplin’s well­fed body can nonetheless
always leap into graceful arabesques or bounce back from pratfalls.
Real poverty wears away and destroys such grace. Rodia’s desperate
life utterly lacks cinematic charm. Working as a tile­setter, he made
the dream of that small suburban house a reality, but he did not find
the mythic California the tramp imagines. Indeed, shortly after he
moved into the Watts house, his third wife left him, and he would
spend the next thirty­four years almost completely alone.25 At times
all but drowning himself in drink, he found his only escape through a
life of total labor. For Rodia, there was no ease in his adopted country,
and if California offered abundance, it was only through backbreaking
toil. His desire to glean and to raise these spires is deeply caught up in
his dislocation. Like Ruth, he finds himself sad among the alien corn,
and so, out of his deepest childhood memories, he recreates a place
238 Banash

for himself. He had come to America from Nola, Italy, when he was
only fifteen years old, and carried with him memories of a festival
commemorating the return of a captive bishop: “The festival was
originated by the eight craft guilds of Nola, and consists of a
procession of eight wood and paper towers (one for each craft guild)
and a ship. The general shape and construction details of Rodia’s
three tallest towers … are remarkably similar to those of the towers
carried on the shoulders of Nola residents in the festival each year”
(Gladstone and Gladstone 28). Rodia’s towers call out to his
childhood in Italy, a testament to his sense of dislocation in language,
culture, and time, and perhaps his own deepest desire to be
miraculously ransomed into a better life.
In a remarkable color photograph from 1957, his face and his
hands are engraved with so much real suffering and toil it is difficult
to look at it for too long. He is the ashen figure of Fitzgerald: his
brown hat is faded to gray, his ex­alcoholic nose blooms, his skin is
like tanned leather, covered over in cement dust. His clothes are
ragged and dirty, torn and frayed, and his powerful hands calloused,
cut, worn. He does not smile. His mouth is held tight, a grimace of
physical pain as he squints into the sun. Those who knew him recall
that he was almost completely inarticulate, and when he did speak it
was out of anger, paranoia, and desperation.
In 1957, William Hale, a young UCLA student, made a short,
color documentary about Rodia and his towers.26 The filmmaker first
avoids the monumental. In a bleak shot we see Rodia’s shadow cut
across the forbidding stretches of urban railway, and then the old man
himself appears, weather beaten and hunched. He stoops down,
bending at the waist, his arm arching down toward the earth. He is the
ancient figure of the gleaner, and his gesture is one of poverty,
humbled labor, and submission. He retrieves a broken coffee cup, and
then he walks on following the tracks, his eyes fixed to the ground.
The landscape of Watts is forbidding. Flat and treeless, it
incarnates the worst excesses of urban blight and desperation: it is
 Gleaning 239

A still from William Hale’s film The Towers, 1957. Courtesy of

William B. Hale.
240 Banash

defined by power lines and rushing cars, decaying trailers and cheap
homes caught under the glare of a washed­out sky and a relentless but
pale sun disclosed by the faded colors of the film. Hale lingers here,
letting us understand that this is a world without a horizon, showing
us the rusting trains and the poverty, the sense that this is no place–a
crossroads for machines. There is no relief for the eye, and the film
drives home the inhumanity of this world.
We follow the hunched figure of Rodia from the tracks to the
street, and the camera catches him moving past decaying shacks, until
suddenly there is a glittering, arched stone wall, unlike anything we
have seen, a startling burst of mosaic pattern and color. Walking in
front of the arching walls inlaid with green glass bottles and tiles, we
understand that Rodia has made this, and, magically, this landscape
has become a place. Suddenly, for the first time in the film, the
camera tilts toward the heavens, following the principal towers that
soar over one hundred feet into the sky. They rise in graceful arches
and circles, a visual rhythm of curves, glinting with intricate, swirling
colors. It seems as if the towers were designed to transform the very
quality of the California sun, to transmute its oppressive ubiquity into
the unexpected and subtle beauty of a place that marks the presence of
something really human.27
Rodia raised these towers with the cast­offs of the world he
found around him. Working with little more than a few hammers,
chisels, and a bucket of cement, he used train tracks to bend found
bits of steel into the graceful, baroque curves that mount one upon
another into the sky. There is not a single weld or rivet in the entire
work. Every surface glitters with mosaics of found glass, crockery,
and whimsical readymades. Over the decades, Rodia “pressed into the
mortar some 11,000 pieces of whole and broken pottery; 15,000
glazed tiles; 6,000 pieces of colored glass; dozens of mirrors; 10,000
seashells, abalone shells and clamshells, hundreds of rocks, large and
small; pieces of marble, linoleum, and telephone­line insulators; and
two grinding wheels” (Gladstone and Gladstone 56). Perhaps what
 Gleaning 241

most marks this monumental work of gleaning is the sense of a

human body. Rick Oginz observes: “The fact that Rodia’s sculpture is
scaled to the stature of a particular man, that’s what makes it seem so
monumental” (20). Hale’s film emphasizes the human labor of
Rodia’s towers, and its scale. We see him gleaning, sorting his finds
on the work bench, using hammers to create new shapes, and then
climbing the towers, his bucket of cement and hammer in hand. We
see each level built only as tall as Rodia could reach. In all this, every
gesture of labor and submission is transformed into tall lyric
extravagance, a horizon for the eyes of Watts.
Though some of Rodia’s neighbors understood that his towers
were a work of art, an unlikely eruption of somewhat inexplicable
beauty in their midst, others seemed not to see the towers at all. Rodia
actually gave them away, casually signing over the deed to his house
and the towers to a neighbor in 1955. He just walked away from
them, leaving others to find an answer to the work he had labored at
for thirty­four years, casting his towers into the world almost as
carelessly as the discarded broken tiles and plates that were used to
adorn them. His neighbor Louis Sauceda neither seemed to
understand the gift he had been given nor to care much for it, and he
in turn sold the house and towers to Joseph Montoya for a paltry five
hundred dollars. Both men simply ignored the towers, the house stood
abandoned, and Sam Rodia never again returned.
For many years, the towers remained victim to casual
vandalism, and hundreds of mosaic elements were damaged. Finally,
someone burned down Rodia’s house. This violence provoked a
careless city to issue a routine demolition order for the whole site. It
would take an entire movement of artists and engineers to reverse that
order, and for a decade after Rodia had finished his work, the city did
everything in their power to tear down the towers. The city officials
railed against the towers and vigorously argued that they were a
danger to public safety, failed to meet the building codes of the city,
and constituted a lethal hazard. The attitude of power toward a
242 Banash

creation that existed completely outside of the institutions and aims of

capitalism, or the business of art, is telling. Sam Rodia’s towers had
been raised from what had been thrown away. Rodia was a slightly
crazy, alienated immigrant laborer who had never asked permission
from the powerful. The grace of his towers, their soaring
extravagance, reminds one of Chaplin’s tramp, the broken body
moving suddenly, taking off with balletic grace, and transforming the
labor and rags of poverty into a nobility, a playfully soaring elegance.
Just as the cop always casts a suspicious glance at the tramp, so the
city saw in the towers an affront to all its values.
The artists and engineers who saved the towers inspire a hope
in the entire enterprise of art itself, and their labor is also a gleaning,
for they reached down to the abandoned and the broken, taking it up
and seeing in it possibility and beauty–perhaps the perfect and only
really adequate response to Rodia’s work.
CONCLUSION: FROM THE TWENTIETH­CENTURY’S
CUTTING EDGE TO THE TWENTY­FIRST­CENTURY
COPY

By the end of the twentieth century, the popular image of collage is

represented most pivotally in serial killer films. Consider Silence of
the Lambs, in which Buffalo Bill literally cuts up his victims, taking
pieces of their skin to assemble a patchwork woman­suit. As the FBI
discovers the bodies, clearly marked as aesthetic objects, they are
confronted with a hermeneutical puzzle, and working through this
aestheticized riddle they assemble a vast array of fragments: maps,
letters, interviews, photographs, notes, and other sundry bits and
pieces which are arranged in a surprisingly artful bulletin board. Thus
the camera pans over the contrasting aesthetic and cognitive strategies
of collage.1 On the one hand, while the mad killer literally cuts apart
and reassembles the human body, he lays bare the social construction
of sexuality and terrifies his victims (and the audience) with the
violent and irrational ruptures of collage. His goal is both to destroy
the limits imposed by the law and to transform himself through what
Max Ernst named the irrational powers of collage. On the other hand,
the detectives reassemble the fragments of the case, seeking not
rupture and transformation but a new and veritable totality that will
reflect and enforce a transcendent logic of truth, cause and effect,
subject and object, law and transgression. Their collage seeks the
conservative restoration of rational order, and they lovingly assemble
every piece of evidence, fetishizing each fragment in visual
arrangements on bulletin boards and in files. The presentation and
244 Banash

importance of these two collage metaphors have become an effective

and predictable film cliché: the obsessive, collecting detectives,
reassembling truth and order out of fragments, and the irrational
killer, fragmenting bodies and creating elaborate assemblages to
transgress and reorganize signs in the irrational desire to transform the
self. The association of collage techniques with mad killers and the
collecting cops is hardly the invention of Hollywood. Indeed, these
figures emerge in the first decades of the twentieth century in the
work of Tristan Tzara and T. S. Eliot.
In “Dada Manifesto: 1918,” Tristan Tzara exclaims that
“every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the
family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in
destructive action.”2 Like the more popular serial killer of cinema, the
charismatic dada prophet goes on to define dada as “the abolition of
logic” and the abolition of “every social hierarchy and equation set
up for the sake of values by our valets” (81).To become the irrational,
transformative semiotic criminals the manifesto calls for, dada artists
employed both visual and verbal collage forms. Offering a critique of
both the depths of lyric subjectivity and journalistic objectivity, Tzara
offers his famous recipe for collage poems. His recipe underscores the
critical potentials of collage as a method for severing connections of
logic and sense, naturalizing repressive and conservative force. The
recipe embodies the violent, playful, and criminal side of collage.
However, perhaps the most famous collage poem of the twentieth
century, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, presents the conservative and
nostalgic side of collage. Not coincidently, Eliot’s poem was
originally entitled He Do the Police in Different Voices, itself a
collaged fragment from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. The
emphasis in that original title highlights the conservative powers of
collage. Unlike Tzara’s persona as the irrational dada criminal, Eliot
is most certainly the nostalgic detective. The speaker of The Waste
Land attempts a restoration of shattered order, and like the police who
must assemble what evidence they can find to put the world back
 Conclusion 245

together and maintain order, the Fisher King can do no more than
assemble the fragments of culture pulverized by the forces of
modernity and of anarchic forces like dada:

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon–O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih Shantih Shantih3

Here we find allusions and ready­made fragments from Dante, Kyd’s

Spanish Tragedy, Gerard de Nerval’s sonnet El Desdichado, and the
anonymous Pervigilium Veneris. In Modern Poetry and the Tradition,
Cleanth Brooks offers a careful reading of this final collage: “Eliot’s
theme is the rehabilitation of a system of beliefs, known but now
discredited.”4 Through the technique of collage itself, Eliot’s poem
tries to make whole what has been broken. As Brooks notes in his
reading of the fragment from The Spanish Tragedy: “Hieronymo in
the play, like Hamlet, was mad for a purpose. The protagonist is
conscious of the interpretation which will be placed on the words
which follow–words which will seem to many apparently
meaningless babble, but which contain the oldest and most permanent
truth of the race: ‘Dara. Dayadhvam. Damyata’”(165). Instead of dada
delight in destruction, Eliot’s speaker is nostalgic for order, and a
careful reading of the collage denies the seeming madness of the
epic’s fragmentation. Like Hieronymo and Hamlet, the speaker also
246 Banash

hopes to avenge the crime of destruction, to be the detective to restore

order–to quite literally do the police in different voices.
By comparing Eliot and Tzara, we can see the way that
collage has a doubled relationship to totality. For the dadaist who
privileges the moment of cutting, collage is a critical technique of
liberation from the totalities of social order and ideology. For the
nostalgic poets of High Modernism like Eliot, the privileged moment
of collage is pasting. Seeing only destruction and madness in the
processes of modernization, the nostalgic collage cop tries to re­
inscribe the shattered order which has been lost. These two desires,
analogous to the two operations of collage (cutting and pasting) form
the dialectic of the technique; while any particular work of art may
privilege one or the other, both are always in play.

VAS: An Opera in Flatland: From Cut­Up to Copy

Reviewers have difficulty describing Steve Tomasula’s 2004 book
VAS: An Opera in Flatland. The title suggests the gesamtkunstwerk of
Wagnerian opera, while the by line asserts that it is a novel, perhaps
this is only in the sense that it might well contain almost anything.
The book combines typographical play with visual elements, from
comic books and advertisements to gene sequences and web pages.
Though there are a plethora of literary and visual techniques
employed in the book, I want to focus on the ways in which Tomasula
uses his collages–both verbal and visual–for critical and conservative
ends under the trope of genealogy. His work stands on a kind of
dividing line, where the collage techniques so associated with mass
production and mass media give way to a new set of metaphorics
from genealogy and emerging biotechnologies that emphasize
copying. Indeed, I see Tomasula’s novel as a work that hinges on this
difference; while it depends on the techniques of collage, it finally
tells the story of an emerging épistémè of copying.
The frame­tale that unites the verbal and visual pyrotechnics
of VAS is surprisingly accessible. In fact, written as a realist narrative,
 Conclusion 247

it might well have had a popular reception. The protagonist Square

(there is a pastiche of names from Edward Abby’s Flatland) is thrown
into a crisis by his decision to undergo a vasectomy for the good of
his wife Circle, who, after difficulties with the birth of their daughter
Oval, is advised not to have more children. This domestic comedy of
manners leads Square to reflect on the historical and ethical troubles
associated with eugenics, and the emerging possibilities of bio­tech
science, where life has been reduced to the editable text of DNA
sequences. In the first pages of the novel the following fragment
appears: “How odd it was to go into a library and find the crumbling
volumes of The Eugenics Review and other learned sciences now so
completely dismissed that coming upon their artifacts was as startling
and enigmatic as coming upon pyramids and great stone heads.”5
Many of the book’s collaged elements precisely present us with these
pyramids and stone heads, in the form of reproductions from books on
eugenics, phrenology, and other assorted documents taken readymade
from pseudo­sciences to the world of contemporary advertising and
legitimate science.
One of the first visual collages in the book creates a telling
juxtaposition between the methods of phrenology and our own more
contemporary use of Scantron® sheets to determine intelligence
through standardized tests. This is followed on the next page with
these fragments:

The relationship between the intelligence of subjects and the volume of their head . . . is
very real and had been confirmed by all methodical investigators without exception.
Alfred Binet 1898
Father of standardized intelligence testing.

A lot of people who were smarter than him had had figured it out.

A simple story with a plot as conventional as a museum’s base boards. (38)

248 Banash

A collage by Steve Tomasula from VAS: An Opera in Flatland, 2002.

The University of Chicago Press. Courtesy of the author.
 Conclusion 249

This is so effective because it combines both the critical and

conservative desires of collage in a single gesture. On the one hand,
the collage is obviously critical. Using the image of the skull and the
phrenological scales, the reader is presented with what, from our
contemporary vantage point, is a failed and pernicious science.
Indeed, the choice of the image, with the skull itself, turns the
selection into a literal memento mori. The facing page reproduces the
ubiquitious Scantron® sheet for recording answers to standardized
questions. This tool of measurement is one that seems far more
contemporary, putting us in mind of a form of testing that is currently
widely accepted. The implied warning of the death’s head is driven
home by the fragment from Alfred Binet on the following page,
underscoring just how absolutely unreliable and dangerous
“scientific” truths can be. This is followed by a phrase that punctuates
such moments throughout the book: “a lot of people who were
smarter than him and had figured it out” (38).
While this is doubtless a critical collage, there is nonetheless
a supplement to its critical force, for both the archaic illustrations of
phrenology and the modern Scantron® sheet are aestheticized. Ripped
from their original contexts, they no longer carry the exclusive burden
of conveying instrumental knowledge. Like outmoded surrealist
found objects, they have been chosen by the artist not only in a
critical gesture but also as those very “pyramids” and “great stone
heads” that for contemporary audiences are less functional religious
icons than works of art as such. Divorced from its instrumental
functions in a textbook or a testing room, the skull and calipers
become merely an image, and there is perhaps even a real touch of
nostalgia for the steel engraving process used to depict it. Similarly,
the Scantron® sheet itself is disappearing in our digital age, and in the
context of the book it too becomes an object of nostalgia. The
importance of visual pleasure is underscored by the decision to
reproduce it in color, the delicate beiges of its lines so much softer
than the relentless black and white of the phrenological readymade.
250 Banash

Yet both the phrenological scale and the Scantron® sheet are also
literal grids, that oddly aesthetized form so ubiquitous in modernist
art. As Rosalind Krauss reminds us, “given the absolute rift that
occurred between the scared and the secular, the modern artist was
obviously faced with the necessity to choose between one mode of
expression or the other. The curious testimony offered by the grid is
that at this juncture he decided for both ... the grid’s mythic power is
that it is able to make us think we are dealing with materialism (or
sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us
with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).”6 Here, quite literal
scientific grids have been inserted into the space of art, and thus their
repressed basis in metaphysical faith is laid bare. This is not to say
there is no critical force in this collage; on the contrary, its dominate
mode is critical. However, that critical force is doubled or shadowed
by the desire to redeem in some way the very torn fragments it
incorporates as critique. Indeed, just as Krauss sees a spiritual desire
as the unconscious of every modernist grid, so every critical collage
also carries a charge of conservative nostalgia.
In her introduction to Illuminations, Hannah Arendt explains
how Benjamin’s own collage aesthetic activates both these critical
and conservative desires, for Benjamin too conceived of his most
ambitious works as the simultaneous and dialectical presentation of
complex verbal and visual collage, making just such use of outmoded
“pyramids” and “stone heads” as Tomasula does of the artifacts of
science:

Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority
which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he
had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a
master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been
replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a
strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of
“peace of mind,” the mindless peace of complacency. “Quotations in my
 Conclusion 251

works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and
relieve an idler of his convictions.” This discovery of the modern function
of quotations, according to Benjamin, who exemplified it by Karl Kraus,
was born out of despair–not the despair of a past that refuses “to throw its
light on the future” and lets the human mind “wander in darkness” as in
Tocqueville, but out of the despair of the present and the desire to destroy
it; hence their power is “not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear
out of the context, to destroy.” Still, the discoverers and lovers of this
destructive power originally were inspired by an entirely different intention,
the intention to preserve; and only because they did not let themselves be
fooled by the professional “preservers” all around them did they finally
discover that the destructive power of quotations was “the only one which
still contains the hope that something from this period will survive–for no
other reason than that it was torn out of it.”7

Arendt’s account of Benjamin’s practice underscores the role of both

the criminal and collector. For Benjamin, the collagist is a
highwayman, literally robbing the reader of unexamined
convictions–at gunpoint blasting the audience beyond ideology. Yet at
the same time the process of gathering together those quotations puts
the author in the position of the obsessive, nostalgic collector. In his
essay “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin gives a fuller account of
the passion of collecting with an apt metaphor in the context of VAS:
“Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes
the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property. The period,
the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership–for a true
collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic
encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object. In this
circumscribed area, then, it may be surmised who the great
physiognomists of the world of objects–turn into interpreters of fate”
(60–1). Seeking profane illumination in forgotten or outmoded objects
expresses the deep nostalgia immanent in any collage practice. In a
more mystical moment, Benjamin himself conceived of such desires
252 Banash

through the Cabalistic myth “The Breaking of the Vessels.” As I have

been arguing above, VAS is both robbing us of convictions about
science, but the very collage process through which this operates also
works to preserve the artifacts of even failed science. Nonetheless,
VAS finds tropes other than Kabbalah to develop this dialectic.
The key pun animating VAS is “genealogy.” On the one hand,
the characters of the book are obsessed with the development of
genealogy and the science of genetics. Contemplating his own
decision to undergo a vasectomy, Square is forced to think about the
entire history of evolution, the politics of reproduction, the ethical
disasters and failings of the twentieth century, and to look with critical
amazement on the emerging techniques and problems of twenty­first­
century bio­science. Thus the science of genealogy that becomes
genetics is everywhere in the book. We are even presented with the
ultimate readymade–the genetic code for gene SHGC­110205–quite
literally 25 pages of “AGCT” permutations. However, there is a
second kind of genealogy in play that relies not on science but the
critical philosophical traditions developed by Fredric Nietzsche and
Michel Foucault. Indeed, we might well read all the techniques of
VAS as attempts to write a critical genealogy of genetics. In this
critical moment, a pervasive technique is to present the so­called
miracles, promises, and future of science in light of its forgotten past.
Tomasula employs numerous techniques to do this, from narrative
pastiche and parody to comic strips, but collage plays a critical role
throughout the book. Thus images of early texts on genetics or
contemporary images of science in various forms are paired with
shocking juxtapositions of statements, images, or combinations of
both. For instance, a statement by Winston Churchill occupies an
entire page: “the rapid growth of the feeble­minded classes coupled as
it is with steady reduction among all superior stocks constitutes a race
danger which should be cut off before another year has passed” (96).
On the facing page, we are presented with the following quotation
from Adolf Hitler: “Whoever is not bodily and spiritually healthy and
 Conclusion 253

worthy shall not have the right to pass on his suffering in the body of
his children” (97). This critical collage collapses the differences
between the seemingly clear cut “sides” represented by would­be
Anglo freedom fighters and evil Nazis, reminding us, as the book
does in so many ways, that the terrible specter of genocide and
eugenics was no German monopoly. Indeed, just a few pages later we
are presented with a fragment of a letter written by George
Washington: “The immediate objectives are the total destruction and
devastation of [Indian] settlements. It will be essential to ruin their
crops in the ground and prevent their planting more” (108). There is
no narrative explanation of how we should read these different
statements. They are presented simply as fragments which have a
complex relationship to one another, as well as to the narrative as a
whole. Most tellingly, they create a genealogy of eugenics itself,
diagnosing this strain of thought as something endemic to the
development of the sciences themselves.
In his pivotal essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,”
Foucault formulates the project of genealogy in terms that seem to
describe exactly the metonymic shifts and puns that animate
Tomasula’s novel: “Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus
situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to
expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s
destruction of the body.”8 In settling his accounts with Nietzsche,
Focault takes up the language of medicine and biology, making
genealogy a matter of physiology. Foucault goes on to formulate the
task of genealogy in strikingly Benjaminian terms:

Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map
the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of
the descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to
identify the accidents, the minute deviations–or conversely, the complete
reversals–the errors, the false appraisals, the faulty calculations that gave
birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us. It is to
254 Banash

discover that the truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and
what we are, but the exteriority of accidents. (81)

It is the very “truth” of the body, or the stability of identity that VAS
calls into question, but it does so by presenting us with precisely those
accidents, errors, and false appraisals that our faith in reason or
science would have us accept as truth. VAS allows us to get behind the
assumptions that animate Square’s constant, ironic refrain: “A lot of
people who were smarter than him had figured it out.” Presenting us
with those accidents and errors, however, introduces a note of
complex irony to the project of genealogy. Foucault himself is
tremendously critical of nostalgic impulses, associating them with the
pernicious projects of “going back in time to restore an unbroken
continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things”
(81). For this reason Foucault is emphatic, asserting that “knowledge
is made for cutting” (88). Yet, from the perspective of Benjamin,
those “forgotten things” exert a tremendous power of their own, and
while their new context, it is overtly critical is covertly nostalgic,
seeking their redemption from the oblivion of the past.
Throughout my discussion of VAS, I have concentrated on the
critical and conservative desires embodied in its collages. However,
why collage should be such a privileged technique in this technically
astonishing work, occurring on almost every page, requires another
line of argument, one that takes us from the first pages to the end of
this work, and from the world of genetics back to the metaphors of
collage as consumption and identity­creation so important to Douglas
Coupland and Janet Fitch. The collages in VAS become more complex
verbal­visual constructions as the narrative develops. Pages 253–276
present a series of brilliant collages, almost wholly made of ready­
made materials. A comprehensive exegesis of this densely textured
palimpsest would require a complete chapter of its own. However,
several images suggest a way to read the role of collage as a whole,
 Conclusion 255

and also to read the change from a world of collage to a world of

copies.
Tomasula introduces us to My Twin, a company that makes
custom dolls based on photos of children. First, we are presented with
a readymade of an order form. A few pages later, this is followed by a
reproduction of an advertisement, showing a young girl holding her
eerie twin. These images are paired with a screenshot of the now
infamous “Ron’s Angels” prank, in which a website purportedly
offered to sell the eggs of female models to would­be parents. Finally,
there is a complete reproduction of a tabloid story about the quite
factual Cindy Jackson, who underwent extensive plastic surgery to
look as much like a living Barbie Doll as possible.
The connections among these images are intriguing, and the
narrative provides very little comment, simply alluding to them at
points. However, in an essay which appeared in Leonardo, “Genetic
Art and the Aesthetics of Biology,” Tomasula investigates the ways in
which bio­technologies are divorced from their instrumental uses in
science and turned to purely aesthetic ends. As Tomasula puts it: “by
stripping bio­science of its pragmatic function and recontextualizing it
as aesthetics, gene artists reanimate issues Duchamp would have
appreciated, especially those of authorship and originality, and the
nature and purpose of art.”9 Certainly many of these same issues are
at the heart of VAS as well, but these issues, like art itself, cannot
escape the logic of the commodity: “Once we can manipulate our own
appearances genetically, will we be able to resist? The billions of
dollars (not to mentions pain) spent each year on tattooing and
aesthetic surgery says otherwise. And if the manipulation of genes for
aesthetic purposes comes to pass, will designer colors follow?
Delphinium­purple eyes? How about a human that glows in the
dark?” (141). This logic suggests the total liquidation of authenticity,
in which the very idea of alienation has been surpassed through an
unprecedented technological leap. Such a radical move would seem to
be the ironic realization of Foucault’s posthuman aspirations, in which
256 Banash

it would no longer be at all possible to appeal to a divinely sanctioned

subject. However, as Tomasula points out, there is another force ready
to interpret this posthuman possibility. If the body itself is simply too
much material to manipulate, it is also so many choices to put in a
catalog. Just as catalogs sell us readymades through which we define
and inhabit lifestyle­identities, the aesthetic under the sign of the
commodity seems poised to fragment and reassemble the body in
disturbing ways. However, the logic of such choices is already there.
In the My Twin order form, the logic of fragmentation is already
evident, and from doll to custom­made body is now a very imaginable
leap. Not only was Cindy Jackson willing to incur titanic costs and
pain to become Barbie, but her example argues that someday Ron’s
Angels will no longer be a prank. The logic of fragmentation and
abstraction necessary to grasp every aspect of the body as a
commodity involves us in the collage process of cutting and pasting.
And indeed, when researchers like Eduardo Kac give a rabbit “the
ability to glow by infusing its cells with the protein that allows
jellyfish to glow under the sea,” (Leonardo 137) isn’t this the ultimate
cut­up?
And yet, these final collages in VAS also suggest that the cut­
up is no longer so centrally a part of Max Ernst’s irrational. The girl
who would choose the My Twin doll does not seek, as the
transgressive serial killer or the dada radical might, to fragment the
world into some fantastic creation beyond a given ideology. Instead,
she seeks to copy herself, to remake in miniature her own image.
Similarly, Cindy Jackson also makes herself into a copy, just as the
would­be consumers of Ron’s Angels seek a different kind of copy.
While VAS begins in the world of cut­ups, its final collages put the
emphasis on copies, for what genes–and ultimately, DNA–seek most
of all is the copy, their own replication, though the price for that can
be the necessity of a cut­up. What powers the entire story of VAS, its
very narrative drive, is reproduction–it pivots on the questions not of
the cut­up, but of the copy. The copy is the key fact of genetics, but it
 Conclusion 257

is also the astonishing technological possibility realized by digital

technologies that, no longer tied to larger kinds of physical mediums,
can instead produce infinite numbers of identical digital copies that
circulate throughout the world at a keystroke.

From Cut­Up to Copy: the Movies and Beyond

In 1903, Edwin S. Porter invented film editing, making Life of an
American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery. Porter created
stories by joining together a series of different shots. It is a shattering
gesture–undoing the unity of other early films that show only an
uninterrupted spectacle, and even more radically undoing the unity of
a dramatic performance on the stage. Porter’s early films are quite
literally collages, fragments of cellulose spliced together with glue.
Editor Walter Murch points out that Porter invented editing in 1903,
the same year that the Wright brothers flew at Kittyhawk, and so 1903
is really a moment when two types of flight are invented–heavier­
than­air flight and the flight of imagination made possible by film
editing.10 Yet the achievements of both the Wright brothers and Porter
depend on a vast fragmentation of knowledge, technique, technology,
and practice that is then put together in the techniques of mass
production that define the twentieth century. The fully­assembled gas
engine and the finished, edited film both seem to create a new unity, a
complete whole; but this perception of unity belies the more
shocking, key moment of cutting that is at the heart of twentieth­
century technologies. It is the cutting–the ability to work in
fragments, parts, pieces drawn from different times, different places,
and various materials that defines collage and also the whole
technological apparatus of mass production. In film this is particularly
true, for the illusion of the the unity of film’s story is just that–the
individual shots taken at different moments, often out of order, are
then assembled in ways that create a radically new sense of meaning,
a coherence that often does a real violence to the actual moments and
orders in which the images were recorded. The cutting edge of collage
258 Banash

is directly linked to mass production, and that is to say to the physical

objects and material processes that so defined the twentieth century,
from the physical form of mass media to the endless objects of the
everyday life of consumer culture. This vast, physical flow of material
was made possible by Fordism, which was premised on a vast
fragmentation of more holistically integrated methods of production.
Though collage has been used as a term for the emerging
world of digital culture, it is a poor metaphor for a world composed
less of things than of codes that are endlessly copied and recopied
either exactly or with additions, subtractions, or complex
manipulations. These codes are not available as unique objects, but as
infinitely available, hauntingly virtual representations of a book, a
song, or a program. In the digital world, the artist and the consumer
increasingly work with copies that are not embodied in unique,
phsyical objects. With more and more of life defined by a constant
and ubiquitous connection to this virtual world, a new set of practices
is emerging as people carry with them access to potentially unlimited
information. This increasing move to a world of code makes for a
radical rethinking of Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura. In “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he argues that
mass produced copies of works of art–from postcards of old master
paintings to identical prints of a single film distributed throughout the
world–destroy aura, the unique existence of a single work of art at a
particular place and time. Aura, for Benjamin, is deeply connected
with the most ancient functions of art as a religious practice, a link to
the sacred. Clearly the mass­produced postcard could not fulfill such
functions, available to anyone at anytime, and thus art could be
manipulated, and aura was no longer a limit on art or its meaning.
Marcel Duchamp could deface the Mona Lisa in LHOOQ because it
was merely a postcard–one of millions. From our vantage point in a
digital world, the question of aura reasserts itself, and what Benjamin
took to be a shattering of aura begins to look more like a vast
extension of it. Duchamp’s gesture now seems to partake in aura that
 Conclusion 259

is not only an attribute of the unique, unreproduced work of art, but is

something that all objects partake in by virtue of their unique
presence in time and space. For instance, any individual postcard can
exist at only one place, and whatever accidents befall it–tears,
defacement, even the stamp of the postmark, contribute to its aura–its
existence as something unique and, strictly speaking irreplacable
because of the history that marks it in its movement through the
world. Though all mass­produced objects begin with only an “infra
thin” difference, as Duchamp puts it, almost all that survive long
enough become shot through with aura. Aura, in this sense, is simply
unavailable to the digital copy, which no matter where it is accessed
in the world it is unmarked by that use. Unlike the individual copy of
a newspaper that an artist might accidentally slice into with a knife to
rediscover collage, the web page, in contrast, can be accessed at any
place in time, by many people simultaneously, and this massive use
leaves no mark on it. It escapes the hand of history that so defines the
fate of the physical world.
Collage began as a cutting into the physical world, a
reshaping of the things that make up the lifeworld, and it was such an
essential technique when the world of the twentieth century was
overwhelmed by mass production. Things certainly still exist, as does
mass production, but the physical is now enmeshed in a new virtual
world that has the same massive panoply of effects on the sense of
everyday life and art that Fordism influenced. The shifting
manipulations of ethereal code exceed the dialectics and metaphorics
of collage, demanding instead a less concrete metaphor, something
beyond the deeply physical metaphor of “cutting” and the even more
emphatic solidity of pasting, the adhering of of two different objects
together on a ground. The most subtle and apt concept to emerge for
this new world of digital codes is copying.
Unlike collage, with its emphasis on fragmentation and
rearrangement, the concept of the copy emphasizes both a radical
dissemination of the infinitely identical and an effortlessness that
260 Banash

verges on the utopian. It is particularly useful to thinking about the

digital world. In his recent book In Praise of Copying, Marcus Boon
argues that copying is the defining practice of both human cultures
and nature itself, but his insight and the persuasiveness of his case are
prompted by the digital world of codes. He writes, “What appears to
be on offer on the Internet, what fuels its imaginal space, is the utopia
of an infinite amount of stuff, material or not, all to be had for the
sharing, downloading, and enjoying. For free.”11 The potential of
copia, Boon’s word for both abundance and our effective powers to
deploy that abundance, are made possible in their utopian aspect by
the seemingly free and potentially infinite circulation of copies on the
internet, particularly evident in the first and most significant socially­
networked application for sharing, Napster. In this world, any digital
information can simply be accessed, uploaded, downloaded, sent
around the world with no more labor than a few clicks of the mouse.
Though an assembly line can be conceptualized as copying, the ways
in which it is caught in the material make us now think the concept of
the copy in a new way since it has been emptied of the tremendous
labor and physicality it required in the past. Boon observes that: “‘Cut
and paste,’ one of the key metaphors found on a personal computer,
refers to an operation of montage or collage, even though there is no
literal cutting or pasting on a computer” (167). The operations of
collage, cutting and pasting, and the physical transformations
involved, become metaphorical because the computer operates by
copying codes–neither a cutting into material, nor a pasting together,
but a more subtle and seamless process of replication, of copying. To
cut and paste at the keyboard is to make a copy that can be
immediately undone. In this sense, collage as it has been practiced
throughout the twentieth century is distinct from digital copying.
To illustrate this physicality, and to illustrate why collage
loses its position as the defining technique of the twenty­first century,
consider Yoko Ono’s 1992 work, Promise Piece. In 1991, the artist
Charlotte Moorman died, and at a art show in her honor, Ono took a
 Conclusion 261

porcelain vase and broke it into pieces. She gave the fragments to
audience members, many of them friends of Moorman and Ono,
calling on them to return and reassemble the broken vase in ten years.
The work recalls “The Breaking of the Vessels” from the Jewish
mystical tradition, and in the context of Moorman’s memorial, it is
certainly an allegory of mortality. As each participant carries a
fragment of the vase, it is a reminder that a particular arrangement of
people has dispersed, more than likely never to be reunited again. The
fragments of the vase travel with the participants, finding new
meaning in other contexts, other arrangements, yet always calling out
with a kind of nostalgia, literally a homesickness, for their first
context, their lost wholeness. The breaking of the physical vase is a
profound reminder of alienation in a modern world, and it works only
because of the way physical objects exist in their unique locations in
space and time. Moreover the mass­produced vase Ono smashes
reminds us that even the most humble and mass­produced objects
now have a Benjaminian aura.
Think, though, about how the networked world of today
radically alters the meaning of Promise Piece. Ono’s work is made at
the moment just before the emergence of cell phones, e­mail, and with
the turn of the twenty­first century, social networking. In 1992, even a
phone call generally meant finding a person in one particular location
in time and space, and mail, for most people, still involved a stamp
and a wait of days or even weeks. While the realities of distance and
time have hardly been eliminated, they have been changed, but not by
cutting or fragmenting. Our new century is instead defined by digital
copies that cannot be smashed, used up, or consumed. In social
networking profiles, while we are not physically present to one
another, groups of people are virtually represented by their digital
copies. Think of a group of Facebook friends, each person’s digital
copy of themselves present to the other, from their photograph to their
status, updated continuously. For such people, something like Ono’s
vase is recreated through these copies, jointed together in a kind of
262 Banash

virtual wholeness barely imaginable in 1992. Their profiles are

perhaps such a radical elimination of aura that almost any physical
object, even a mass­produced, cheap vase seems to take on the very
qualities of a unique location in time and space that Benjamin once
reserved for fine art.
One might suggest that Facebook pages are a collage, that
they depend on the very dynamics of cutting and pasting, selection
and arrangement, the very structure at work in synthetic cubism or a
photomontage. In some sense this is true, but only as a kind of
sublation, for the meanings of the cutting and pasting are quite
different. I believe that these virtual manipulations and forms are far
more powerfully grasped not as radical cuts so much as infinitely
proliferating copies. In the twentieth century, the power of collage is
in large part tied to its cutting into physical materials. Tristan Tzara’s
“recipe” for a Dadist poem instructs the poet to cut up a newspaper
article and put all the individual words into a hat. There is a castrating
perogative in this gesture, as at least that particular copy of the paper
is destroyed. In the context of the web, what is posted on web sites or
profiles are copies. More often than not, they come with a link. Even
if it is a fragment, usually a click is all that is needed to return one to
some previous, larger context–in essence, the vase can be reassembled
with almost no effort–the fragments magically reversed, almost like
running a film backwards. Indeed, whatever cuts or changes the artist
may make to a given text or image on the web, that digital vase
remains seemigly unmarked, untouched, and fully available to
anyone.
In the physical collages of the twentieth century, the materials
were almost always used up. To create the collage meant destroying
books, newspapers, photographs, or objects. They were cut to
fragments, and this gestured toward a kind of fallen state. As many
things as there are in the world, no matter how infinite they may
seem, they are caught in the state of matter, limited and vulnerable to
destruction, and often destroyed in the process of consumption.
 Conclusion 263

Marcus Boon suggests that the possibilities of the digital copy undo
this fallen state of the physical, giving us at least the promise of an
infinite plenitude:

The free culture that really interests us is the one described by a character in
the remarkable science­fiction novel Roadside Picnic, by the Russian
Communist­era writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: “Happiness for
everybody! . . . Free! As much as you want! . . . Everybody come here! . . .
There’s enough for everybody! . . . Nobody will leave unsatisfied! . . . Free!
. . . Happiness! . . . Free!” What appears to be on offer on the Internet, what
fuels its imaginal space, is the utopia of an infinite amount of stuff, material
or not, all to be had for the sharing, downloading, and enjoying. For free.
And this too is Copia’s domain, which can still be accessed today through
“copying.” (42)

Copia, Boon explains, is the Roman god of abundance, and represented

both the abundance of harvest but also the power to deploy that
abundance. Because the internet offers us a proliferation of copies that
are inexhaustible, the promise of copia seems potentially realized
because in the virtual world, the vicious limit of scarcity is overcome.
What gets posted on a website is not a physical object that is
consumed in its unique arrangement in time and space, but a digital
copy, potentially infinite and inexhaustible. Today, the radical cuts of
collage have been sublimated into ubiquitous practices of copying
that we see both in fine art and in everyday practice.
At a conference in 2011, the performance artist and critical
theorist Jackie Orr remarked on the process of criticism and
theoretical investigation. She said, “I can’t cut unless I know where
the edge is.”12 Her remark turns on the cliché of science and
technology being on “the cutting edge.” The metaphor is that new
knowledge, ability, technologies are produced as we cut into the
world, be it a body under the scalpel or a paradigm cut through by a
new concept. The cutting edge powerfully suggests all the
264 Banash

metaphorics of collage: fragmenting operations, the assembly line,

science, and the avant­garde. In every field of the twentieth century, it
seemed that there was a cutting edge fragmenting old knowledge,
reassembling new forms, and profoundly affecting everyday life.
Perhaps the new edge is the copy, but as I have tried to show
throughout this book, collage was the cutting edge of the twentieth
century.
 NOTES

Introduction
1. Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (Stilwell, KS:
Digireads, 2007), 56.
2. Comte de Lautréamont, Les chants de maldoror, trans. Guy
Wernham (New York: New Directions, 1965), 263.
3. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and
Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969),
275.
4. William S. Burroughs, Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of
William S. Burroughs 1960­1997, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Ann
Arbor: Semiotext(e), 2008), 121.
5. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the
Sign, trans. Charles Levin (New York: Telos, 1981), 38.
6. Northrop Frye, “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths,” in
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000), 131–223.
7. Lévi­Strauss observes the symbolic operations of the raw and the
cooked in organizing sexual reproduction and marriage, and he
reflects on the folk customs of putting an unmarried older sister
onto the stove or making unmarried young people eat raw foods:
“The putting onto the oven … may be a symbolic gesture intended
to mediatize a person who, still unmarried, has remained
imprisoned in nature and rawness, and perhaps even destined to
decay. But the barefoot dance and the giving of the salad do less
to change this situation than to signify it.” Claude Lévi­Strauss,
266 Banash

The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology;

1, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row,
1964), 337.
8. In the film Clueless (1995), Writer­Director Amy Heckerling makes
just this point. The young Cher throws the ready­made dough into
the oven as a performance of femininity to impress her date, but
she is so alienated from actual labor and the practice of cooking,
she leaves it to burn. She desires the simulation of the mediating
process of cooking, but cannot muster the attention for even such
a minimal mediatization.
9. Max Ernst, Beyond Painting: and Other Writings (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 17.
10. Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is also a collage
artist, as are many other fictional serial killers, who see their
victims as so much ready­made material to be eviscerated and
then made into assemblages. I return to this figure in the
conclusion.
11. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism (New
York: Basic Books, 1996), 19.
12. See Thomas P. Brockelman’s brilliant analysis of the role of
framing in relation to collage in the work of Karsten Harries in
The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and the Postmodern
(Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001). Brockelman
sees collage and the process of fragmentation in much broader
terms than I do, as I limit my analysis to questions and works of
art that rely, generally, on wholly ready­made materials while he
looks at many other forms of fragmentation that can be read
though the metaphor of collage.

Chapter 1
1. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (New York: Rinehart, 1948),
177.
 Notes 267

2. Heidi Cody, “Artist Statement,” June 22, 2006, http://

www.heidicody.com/images/art/new_art_page/hcody_stmt.html.
3. Jean­Paul Sartre, “What is Literature?” and Other Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 49.
4. See Thomas P. Brockelman’s extensive discussion of the role of
framing in relation to collage in his chapter “Breaking the Frame
of Truth: Karsten Harries and the Truth of Art” in The Frame and
the Mirror: On Collage and the Postmodern 17­38.
5. In Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed takes the myth of Osiris’s
dismemberment to structure the contemporary experiences.
Similarly, in Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon invokes both
the myths of Osiris and Orpheus to develop Slothrop’s ultimate
disintegration.
6. Tom Hare, Remembering Osiris: Number, Gender, and the Word in
Ancient Egyptian Representational Systems (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1999), 23.
7. R. E. Witt, Isis in the Ancient World (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University, 1997), 40.
8. W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion: A Study of the
Orphic Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993), 39.
9. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1903), 456.
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 41.
11. Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a
Postmodern Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1982), 5–6.
12. Gershom G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans.
Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken, 1965), 113.
13. Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum, “Fragment 24,” 1798.
14. Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on
268 Banash

the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville:

University of Virginia Press, 1994), 34.
15. This formulation is strikingly similar to Jacque Lacan’s theory of
the “mirror phase,” in which he maintains that the toddler comes
to see itself not as it is, but as it might be in power and perfection.
In gazing at a more complete and powerful image in the mirror,
“[w]e have only to understand the mirror stage as an
identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to that term:
namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he
assumes an image.” Jacque Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 2.
16. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 11–12.
17. Even before the unprecedented industrialization of the nineteenth
century, commodity culture was inexorably developing as world
trade expanded. In the West, the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries saw the importation of such exotic commodities as
coffee, tea, sugar, and other goods, and by the middle of the
eighteenth century, the world economy had become thoroughly
global. Though historians continue to push the origins of
consumer culture back to the early modern period, and even
through much of the nineteenth century, masses of people in both
Europe and America continued to live in economies of
subsistence, barter, scarcity, and poverty.
18. Interestingly, McLuhan’s thought seems to suggest that in the
twenty­first century, we have moved beyond collage, truly the art
form of the twentieth century. Our turn toward the seamless, the
simulated, and all things digital returns us to an earlier tribal self
(8).
19. Henry Ford, My Life and Work (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday,
Page, 1922), 108, quoted in Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 157. See also Robert Latham’s
Consuming Youth.
 Notes 269

20. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans.

Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995), 76.
21. In this, McLuhan seems to confirm Derrida’s critical identification
of the voice as the mark of Western presence. Certainly McLuhan
would be vulnerable to Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism, but
one wonders if McLuhan would then frame Derrida as the most
radical extension of the visible sense, a position only possible
because of its very modernity?
22. Here again, Hausmann seems to intuit McLuhan’s point that we
are most often numb to the changes our media technologies work
upon us.
23. Peter Wollen offers a fascinating comparison of eighteenth­
century automatons and later robots and cyborgs in Raiding the
Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth­Century Culture (New York:
Verso, 1993), 43–47.
24. One needs to only think of the mythmaking about tycoons in the
pages of Fortune and Time, or the monumental photographs of
industrial workers as supermen.
25. I concentrate on the American context here, but this same postwar
emphasis on consumer lifestyles profoundly affected
Europe–France in particular–giving rise to the work of Marxists
like Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau.
26. Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (New York: David McKay,
1960), 4.
27. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the
Sign, trans. Charles Levin (New York: Telos, 1981), 33.
28. Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2004), 158. One could easily argue that dada
collages and installations effectively did much the same thing.
And yet, considered carefully, the anxieties of dada were still
predominately responding to the problems of production, what
McLuhan describes as hot media, and it was the ideological forces
270 Banash

of militarism and industrialism that dominate their collage

sensibility, with its endless bolts, tools, machines, spare parts,
tires, and other industrial icons.
29. See Taylor, 160.
30. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation: and
Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 275.
31. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New
York: Basic Books, 1996), 69. Bell’s analysis of the
transformative effects of mass production and its attendant
consumer culture were invoked as the sign of modernity by
European artists. See Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox:
Reflections on Twentieth­Century Culture (New York: Verso,
1993).
32. William C. Sietz, The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1961), 14.
33. This seems all the more plausible if we believe that the artist’s
sister, Suzanne, supposedly threw the original into the trash when
she cleared out his studio after his move to America. Walter
Hopps, Ulf Linde, and Arturo Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp: Ready­
Mades, etc. (1913–1964) (Milan: Galleria Schwarz, 1964), 588.
34. Octavio Paz, “The Ready­Made,” in Marcel Duchamp in
Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1975), 84.
35. I’m extraordinarily indebted to William Camfield, “Duchamp’s
Fountain: Aesthetic Object, Icon, or Anti­Art?” in The
Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 133–178.
36. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant­Garde, trans. Michael Shaw
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 51–52.
37. [Marcel Duchamp] “The Richard Mutt Case,” in The Blind Man 2
(May 1917): 5.
38. Louise Norton, “Buddha of the Bathroom,” in The Blind Man 2
(May 1917): 5–6.
 Notes 271

39. Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalsim: On Marcel Duchamp’s

Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan and
Thierry de Duve (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), 41.
40. Dawn Ades, Neil Cox, and David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 161. It is difficult to make
any single statement about Duchamp that would escape
complication or contradiction in his own comments, or simply by
the variety of his works. Certainly Belle Haleine perfume bottle
advertisements, with Duchamp in the guise of Rrose Sélavy
would seem to support Dawn Ades’s argument, but this is not the
readymade invoked. Instead, show windows are called forth for
bicycle wheels and dog combs, those decidedly machined and
quite anonymous objects.
41. David Brooks, On Paradise Drive (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2004), 5.
42. Linda Norden and Sarah Sze, Sarah Sze (New York: Abrams,
2007), 215.
43. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of
High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books,
1973), 55.
44. A comparison of Sze’s use of the car with J. G. Ballard’s novel
Crash would reveal a profound transformation of our
psychosexual investments in commodities, movements, sexuality,
and death. For Ballard, cars are part of the fragmenting machine
aesthetic of production, making us shattered component parts,
while for Sze, the car is simply another thing to flow through our
lives and return to its own fragmented state, while the consumer
simply chooses another from the shelf.

Chapter 2
1. Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), 153.
272 Banash

2. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative

Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Scribner, 1959), 304.
3. Georges Ribemont­Dessaignes, “History of Dada,” in The Dada
Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1989), 109.
4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006).
5. Anderson relies on Walter Benjamin’s distinction between a sacred
messianic time, in which the world will be reconciled to a sacred
meaning, and the empty time of history, in which nothing is
determined except by the unfolding of events.
6. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968),
221.
7. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken, 1968), 100.
8. In “The Storyteller,” Benjamin observes: “The art of storytelling is
reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying
out. This, however, is a process that has been going on for a long
time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it
merely a ‘symptom of decay,’ let alone a ‘modern’ symptom. It is,
rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive
forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed
narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is
making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing,” (87).
Benjamin eschews a sentimental nostalgia here, but the whole
force of the essay points out the transformative, inhuman scale of
modernity. Further, the terms by which he stages “information”
versus “story” invites a nostalgia for the scale of human memory.
9. One could add many English and American names to this list,
including Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, as well as novelists like
 Notes 273

John Dos Passos. The importance of the newspaper to modernist

aesthetics cannot be overestimated.
10. Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and
the Invention of Collage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1992), 152. My analysis of newspapers and many of the texts I
look at, particularly Mallarmé’s essay on the book, were first
suggested to me by Poggi’s chapter “Cubist Collage, the Public,
and the Culture of Commodities,” and I am deeply indebted to her
insightful reading of the situation of newspapers and the role
newspapers played in cubism and wider French culture.
11. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1999), 47.
12. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Man (New York: Signet, 1964), 189.
13. René De Livois, Histoire de la presse Française, vol. 1
(Lausanne: Éditions Spes, 1965), 272.
14. Charles Augustin Sainte­Beauve, “Industrial Literature,” in
Revolutions in Writing: Readings in Nineteenth­Century French
Prose, ed. and trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996), 29.
15. Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument,” in
Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New
Directions, 1982), 81.
16. Clement Greenberg, “Avant­Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and
Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 9.
17. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Postmodern
Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art, ed. Howard Risatti
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), 14.
18. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 9.
19. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Vintage,
1973), 289.
274 Banash

20. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant­Garde and Other

Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 158. See
also Thomas P. Brockelman’s discussion of Greenberg’s and
Krauss’s disagreements about collage and the role of flatness for
modernism generally, which Brockelman grasps through the
aesthetics of theatricality in The Frame and the Mirror: On
Collage and the Postmodern 64­75.
21. Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” in The Dada Painters and
Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 1989), 81.
22. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of
Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1972), 41.
23. In André Breton: Magus of Surrealism, Anna Balakian argues the
respective states of the manuscripts for both the “Manifesto of
Surrealism” and Soluble Fish support a reading of the former as a
carefully crafted work of rhetoric and the latter as an outpouring
of the unconscious: “But when in that brilliant year of 1924 the
First Manifesto as well as Poisson Soluble appeared, he stated that
five years of preparation lay behind him. The two distinct
characters of Breton’s prose are dramatically evident in these two
manuscripts. Whereas the many corrections and modifications in
the First Manifesto show the struggle of the word to convey an
idea and the efforts of ideas to seek organization, evidenced by
many corrections and modification, the manuscript of Poisson
Soluble is virtually free of any change, the hand having covered
the page as if propelled by some magic and infallible force. The
contrast is dazzling. The impeccable handwriting of Breton in
total composure and without a sign of struggle seems to have
flowed from a pure and inexhaustible source.” Anna Elizabeth
Balakian, André Breton: Magus of Surrealism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1971), 64–65.
 Notes 275

24. See Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image:

Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998). Adamowicz has a brilliantly detailed
analysis of surrealist newspaper collage practices, and provides
some of the most exhaustive readings of Surrealist collage
practice ever produced. See in particular her analysis and images
of the newspaper collage poems from Breton’s first manifesto,
and her excellent discussion of the larger metaphors of cutting and
pasting, particularly pp. 46­56.
25. André Breton, Soluble Fish, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans.
Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1972), 60–61.
26. William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (New
York: Seaver, 1978), 43–44.
27. Barry Miles, The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in
Paris, 1958–1963 (New York: Grove, 2001), 195–196.
28. Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography
and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
29. Sinclair Beiles, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Brion
Gysin, Minutes to Go (San Francisco: Beach, 1968), 3.
30. Terry Wilson, “Brion Gysin,” in Re/Search #4/5: William
Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Throbbing Gristle, ed. V. Vale and
Andrea Juno, (San Francisco: V/Search, 1982), 40.
31. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 101.
32. Yve­Alain Bois and Carroll Dunham, “Robert Rauschenberg’s
Combines: Two Views,” Artforum International, March 2006,
245.
33. Leo Steinberg and Robert Rauschenberg, Encounters with
Rauschenberg: A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000), 53, quoted in Yve­Alain Bois
276 Banash

and Carroll Dunham, “Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines: Two

Views,” Artforum International, March 2006, 247.
34. Kenneth Goldsmith, Day (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures,
2003), 3.

Chapter 3
1. One might associate the operation of cutting with the radical avant­
garde, which often left the ragged edge as an index of such
violence. The pasting together, especially in an attempt to hide the
seams and cuts is often, but not always, associated with
conservative desires.
2. Raoul Hausmann and Mark Dachy, Courrier Dada (Paris: Editions
Allia, 2004), 42.
3. See my article “From Advertising to the Avant­Garde: Rethinking
the Invention of Collage,” in Postmodern Culture 14 no. 2 (2004),
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/pmc/v014/14.2banash.
html.
4. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of
Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 38.
Mitchell’s discussion of the Uncle Sam figure brilliantly suggests
the play of artistic fantasy finding real blood for the nation.
5. I am indebted to Dr. Hans­Christian Pust at the Bibliothek für
Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart for describing these prints and
providing examples. Personal correspondence to author, July 6,
2009.
6. André Bazin, What is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 15.
7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 82.
8. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 28–29.
9. Georges Hugnet, “The Dada Spirit in Painting,” in The Dada
Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell
 Notes 277

(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1989), 125. Hugnet’s observation is

profoundly complicated by the fact that many artists contributing
to the avant­garde art of the 1920s were simultaneously producing
commercial work. See Maud Lavin, “Photomontage, Mass
Culture, and Modernity,” in Montage and Modern Life:
1914–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1992), 36–59 for a remarkable analysis of the commercial
work of Schwitters and others.
10. Douglas Kahn, John Heartfield: Art and Mass Media (New York:
Tanam, 1985), 23. I rely on Kahn’s account of Heartfield
throughout.
11. The first use of the photomontage technique by the Berlin dadaists
has always been the subject of some debate, as two groups of
people have claimed it as their invention: Grosz and Heartfield on
the one hand and Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch on the
other. Steve Plumb, Neue Sachlichkeit 1918–33: Unity and
Diversity of an Art Movement (New York: Editions Rodopi), 122.
Grosz recalls, “In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented
photomontage in my studio at the south end of town at five
o’clock one May morning, we had no idea of the immense
possibilities, or of the thorny but successful career, that awaited
the new invention.” Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1986), 19.
12. Sabine Kriebel, “Photomontage in the Year 1932: John Heartfield
and the National Socialists,” in Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 1
(2008): 107. This article offers a superbly detailed reading of
Heartfield’s work during the run­up to the Nazi seizure of power.
13. “The actual term photomontage also comes from Grosz and
Heartfield, who stamped mont., an abbreviation of montiert
(assembled), on works with their names, instead of signatures. An
example of this is Dada­merika (1919), which is stamped ‘grosz­
heartfield mont’” (Plumb 122). Douglas Kahn emphasizes the
anti­aesthetic and pro­working class connotations of this
278 Banash

designation: “With its early­20s incidence in Germany and

Russia, ‘montage’ carried the class connotations on either side of
‘construction’: the working class which does the construction and
the intelligentsia which conceives of the construction–engineers,
scientists, and artists” (107).
14. In her thorough analysis of Heartfield’s work in the 1930s,
Kriebel points out that several of his montages took the
communist line from Moscow, perhaps against his better
judgment (97).
15. Matthew Teitelbaum, “Preface,” in Montage and Modern Life:
1919–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1992), 8.
16. Krauss suggests that Breton himself fails to theorize the continuity
between automatic writing and surrealist painting with its
emphasis on “vision” as a key sense.
17. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant­Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 101.
18. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver
and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1972), 14.
19. André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove,
1960), 129–30.
20. This is true both of surrealist automatic writing and the cultivation
of objective chance. In automatic writing, the artist discovers
something already formed, but unconscious; it is less an act of
creation than discovery. In a sense, the objective chance encounter
is simply the same process writ large on the social field.
21. Johanna Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism,
and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 87.
22. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of
Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 41–42.
23. Certainly the emphasis here is on sex, but one might also read
erotic in the utopian cast given it by Freud and thus see part of the
 Notes 279

appeal as the joining of humanity together in a better, brighter

world, though from the advertiser’s perspective that better world
might only mean soap for brighter dishes or floors. Jackson Lears
looks carefully at the wild promises of patent medicines, which
always sold the idea of personal and social transformation of
greater health. The alchemical resonances are quite close to
surrealism.
24. The mannequins of surrealism are deeply fraught and certainly
deeply misogynist and sadistic figures. See in particular Rudolf E.
Kuenzli, “Surrealism and Misogyny” in Surrealism and Women,
eds. Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gloria Gwen
Raaberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 17–26.
25. André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 19.
26. The entire 1938 exhibition is recreated through accounts and
photographs with meticulous detail by Lewis Kachur, Displaying
the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist
Exhibition Installations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
27. For instance, Breton’s uncertain and open encounters on the
streets of Paris, which he narrates in both Nadja and Mad Love
took place without such frames or borders, on the terrain of the
street, inspiring both desire but also great unease in Breton.
However, turned into gallery space or the framed work of art, the
reader or the spectator can revel in the lyricism of such
productions without taking any of the risk.
28. The emphasis on readymades as mostly, or only, instances of the
institutional critique of art have been the heart of interpretation for
forty years. Rather than rehearse this, I’m trying to suggest ways
that readymades function as practices and contests of meaning
beyond the frame of art.
29. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald
Nicholson­Smith (New York: Zone, 1994), 13.
280 Banash

30. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans.

Malcolm Imrie (New York: Verso, 1998), 9.
31. Giorgio Agamben, “Violence and Hope in the Last Spectacle,” in
Situacionistes: Art, Politica, Urbanisme / Situationists: Art,
Politics, Urbanism, eds. Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa
(Barcelona: Museu d’art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996), 75.
32. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria
Glaser, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 1.
33. Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the
International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization
and Action,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans.
Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 25.
34. “Definitions,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and
trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981),
45.
35. Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” in Situationist International
Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of
Public Secrets, 1981), 51.
36. While the focus on avant­garde Paris might feel insular or
hackneyed today, careful reading shows that the situationists were
on the right track and their critiques of urban planning are much
the same as those made by Mike Davis of Los Angeles in City of
Quartz, or that Samuel R. Delany so passionately describes in his
memories of a rationalized and spectacularized disaster in Times
Square Red, Times Square Blue. One can only guess how horrified
the situationists would be in the sprawl described by Delores
Hayden in Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth,
1820–2000.
37. Thomas McDonough, “The Dérive and Situationist Paris,” in
Situacionistes: Art, Politica, Urbanisme / Situationists: Art,
Politics, Urbanism, eds. Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa
(Barcelona: Museu d’art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996), 54.
 Notes 281

38. Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, “Methods of Détournement,” in

Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb
(Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 13.
39. Kathy Acker, interview by Ellen G. Friedman, “A Conversation
with Kathy Acker,” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction 9, no.
3 (1989): 20.
40. Kathy Acker, interview by Sylvère Lotringer, in Hannibal Lecter,
My Father (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 18.
41. Kathy Acker, “Dead Doll Humility,” in Postmodern Culture 1, no.
1 (1990), http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/postmodern_
culture/v001/1.1acker.html.
42. Robbins’s publishers overlooked this use of ready­made,
copyrighted material until the late 1980s, when Acker’s British
publisher reissued the book. A journalist unfamiliar with the
tradition of literary collage informed Robbins that he was being
plagiarized, and under tremendous pressure from her own
publisher, and with no legal representation, Acker was bullied into
signing an apology for her “plagiarism.” The fear and confusion
this case elicited in both Acker’s and Robbins’s respective
publishers is, ironically, proof of just how Acker’s use of such
material threatened the concepts of authorship and ownership.
43. Kathy Acker, Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels (New York: Grove,
1997), 84.
44. Kathy Acker, Bodies of Work: Essays (New York: Serpent’s Tail,
1997), 159.
45. Andrew Renton and Linder, Linder: Works 1976–2006 (London:
JRP|Ringier, 2006), 17.
46. Roger Sabin, Punk Rock, So What?: The Cultural Legacy of Punk
(New York: Routledge, 1999), 191.
47. James R. Currie, personal correspondence to author, July 26,
2009. See also his recent book Music and the Politics of Negation
(Musical Meaning and Interpretation) (Bloomington: University
of Indiana Press, 2012).
282 Banash

48. See my discussion of collage novels and metaphor in Chapter 4.

49. The Burroughs interview is reprinted in the book by William S.
Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (New York: Seaver
Books, 1978), 4.
50. Jean­Paul Sartre, “What is Literature?” and Other Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 49.
51. For a brilliant reading of the ways that the creative and legal
aspects of collage, sampling, and copyright work in The Grey
Album, see Davis Schneiderman’s “Everybody’s Got Something
to Hide Except Me and My Lawsuit: William S. Burroughs, D. J.
Danger Mouse, and the Politics of Grey Tuesday” in Cutting
Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and
Copyright Law, eds. Rudolf Kuenzli and Kembrew McLeod
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) 132–51.
52. Devin McKinney, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and
History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003),
243–244.
53. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” in
Popular Culture: A Reader, eds. Raiford Guins and Omayra
Zaragoza Cruz (London: Sage, 2005), 123.
54. Kembrew McLeod, Freedom of Expression: Resistance and
Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 236.
55. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 255.

Chapter 4
1. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict
(London: Verso, 1996), 100.
2. Peter Bogdanovich, The Battle Over Citizen Kane. Disc 2. Citizen
Kane, two­disc special ed. DVD. Directed by Orson Welles (1941;
Atlanta, GA: Turner Home Entertainment, 2001).
 Notes 283

3. Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” The Citizen Kane Book (Boston:

Little, Brown, 1971), 59.
4. Citizen Kane, two­disc special ed. DVD. Directed by Orson Welles
(1941; Atlanta, GA: Turner Home Entertainment, 2001).
5. Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (New York:
Bantam, 1989), 2.
6. John W. Smith, “Saving Time: The Archives of The Andy Warhol
Museum,” http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmag/bk_issue/1996
/janfeb/warhol.html
7. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book
Collecting,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah
Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Schocken, 1968), 60.
8. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 1999), 211.
9. Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of
Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 24.
10. Robert A. Latham, “Collage as Critique and Invention in the
Fiction of William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker,” in Modes of
the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Twelfth International
Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, eds. Robert A. Latham
and Robert A. Collins (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995), 32.
11. For excellent descriptions of Cornell’s many collections, see
Deborah Soloman, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph
Cornell (New York: MFA, 2004).
12. P. Adams Sitney, “The Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell” in
Joseph Cornell, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1980), 75.
13. Deborah Soloman, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph
Cornell (New York: MFA, 2004), 111.
14. Todd Oldham and Cindy Sherman, John Waters (Place Space)
(New York: Ammo Books, 2008) richly illustrates the museum
284 Banash

that is Waters’s home. John Waters, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book

about Bad Taste (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2005) details his
obsessions and collections of all things camp.
15. John Waters’s Web site can be viewed at: http://www.dreamland
news.com.
16. Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My
Life: The History of the Disc Jockey (New York: Grove, 1999), 9.
17. Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and
Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (New York: McGraw­Hill, 1987),
2, also quoted in Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a
DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey (New York:
Grove, 1999), 10.
18. Gavin Edwards, “Odelay’s Secret History: Beck Tells the Stories
Behind His Newly Reissued Classic,” Rolling Stone, February 21,
2008, http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/18310938/odelays
_secret_history.
19. Jean Baudrillard, “Art Between Utopia and Anticipation” in The
Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Texts, Interviews, ed. Sylvère
Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodges (New York: Semiotext(e), 2005),
53.
20. William Davies King, Collections of Nothing (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), 104.
21. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 184.
22. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 2003), 246.
23. Additionally, Mikita Brottman writes movingly of Jean­Paul
Sartre’s obsession with these imagettes as well in her book, The
Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint,
2008).
24. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968),
217–252.
 Notes 285

25. Janet Fitch, White Oleander (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), 317.
26. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 258.
27. Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet (New York: Pocket Books,
1993), 199–200.
28. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 184–85.
29. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1985), 84.
30. Chip Lord, Automerica: A Trip Down U.S. Highways from World
War II to the Future; A Book (New York: Dutton, 1976), 124.
31. Tom Wolfe, The Kandy­Kolored Tangerine­Flake Streamline Baby
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1963), 91.

Chapter 5
1. Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,”
in The Marx­Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, trans. Martin
Milligan, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 88–89. Marx’s
formulation here is strikingly anti­puritan, since he unreservedly
celebrates the material world and the role of objects in making us
human. Later critics including Matthew Arnold and others would
take the more theological point of view that objects and
materialism in general are in large measure responsible for the
dehumanizing miseries of modernity.
2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy; The Process
of Capitalist Production, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel
Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: The Modern Library,
1906), 84.
3. Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture
from Aristotle to Zappa, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2005), 11–12.
4. This particular transformation is particularly well illustrated by the
career of Hugh Hefner. When Playboy was in Chicago in the
1950s and early 1960s, literature, art, and serious jazz were
286 Banash

mainstays of the publication and the television shows. After the

move to California in the 1970s, Playboy dropped all such
pretensions.
5. I am deeply indebted to Agnès Varda’s film Les Glaneurs et la
glaneuse for the history of this practice and its profound
implications as a metaphor for the practices I describe. Les
Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), DVD, directed by
Agnes Varda (2000; New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2002).
6. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995), 5.
7. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven
Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1984), xvi–xx.
8. Anonymous, Evasion (Salem, OR: CrimethInc. Far East, 2003),
265.
9. Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (New York: David McKay,
1960), 25.
10. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (W. W. Norton:
New York, 2005), 86.
11. Interestingly, punk’s militant culture arose as a reaction to hippie
counterculture, but in recent years, the political commitments of
punk have almost entirely embraced the political critiques and
most policy commitments of late 60s subcultures.
12. Rat Patrol, “Manifesto: Rebel in the Ashcan,” http://www.rat­
patrol.org/Manifesto7.html.
13. Freegans, “Waste Reclamation,” http://freegan.info/?page_id=8.
14. Steven Kurutz, “Not Buying It,” New York Times, June 21, 2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/garden/21freegan.html?_r=1
15. Ruth 1:16, Authorized (King James) Version.
16. Boaz twice instructs his servants and kinsman to watch over Ruth
and make sure that she is not “touched” or “molested” while she
gleans. This injunction underscores the vulnerability of women
who must work under such dangerous circumstances.
 Notes 287

17. John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” in The Oxford Book of

English Verse: 1250–1900, ed. A. T. Quiller­Couch (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1908), 728.
18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, ed. T. N. R.
Rogers, trans. Horace B. Samuel (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), 21.
19. Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), DVD, directed
by Agnes Varda (2000; New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2002).
20. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 2003),
27.
21. The Kid, DVD, directed by Charlie Chaplin (1921; Burbank, CA:
Warner Home Video, 2004).
22. In City Lights, this is even true of the millionaire who befriends
the tramp when drunk, but can never remember him when sober.
Reeling, suicidal, and discomposed, the tramp and the millionaire
connect. For Chaplin, our humanity is in our stumbles and
moments of most naked need. City Lights, DVD, directed by
Charlie Chaplin (1931; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2004).
23. Modern Times, DVD, directed by Charlie Chaplin (1936;
Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003).
24. See Salman Rushdie’s brilliant analysis of poverty and realism in
The Wizard of Oz (London: BFI Film Classics), 18–23.
25. For the account of Rodia’s life, I rely on Bud Gladstone and Arloa
Paquin Gladstone, The Los Angeles Watts Towers (Los Angeles:
Getty, 1997).
26. The Towers, directed by William Hale (Los Angeles: Creative
Film Society, 1957).
27. Sculptor Rick Oginz “sees Rodia’s work as grappling with the
fulfillment of a basic human desire, as well as the solution to a
fundamental human problem, both existing since the dawn of
civilization: how to mark one’s home place. Rodia’s intention,
Oginz suggests, was to create a mnemonic device, a ‘memory­
trigger’ towering on the horizon of consciousness. In the physical
world, it would serve as a tangible landmark for Rodia”
288 Banash

(Gladstone and Gladstone 19). Given Rodia’s practice as a

gleaner, he made not only a home for himself, but also for all
those cast­off things from which it was built.

Conclusion
1. This is a standard visual strategy to present the work of
investigators, and in addition to Silence of the Lambs directed by
Jonathan Demme (1991; Beverly Hills, CA: MGM Video, 2001)
DVD, the sequel Hannibal directed by Ridley Scott (2001;
Beverly Hills, CA: MGM) has similar collage scenes as Agent
Starling, played by Julianne Moore, looks over similar collages.
The same kinds of collages can be seen in Seven directed by
David Fincher (1995; Los Angeles CA: New Line Cinema). We
might note that the presentation of vast collages of photographs,
tapes, and evidence is itself a metaphor for the film, though in
most Hollywood films we are presented with each fragment in its
proper order.
2. Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto: 1918,” in The Dada Painters and
Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 1989), 81.
3. T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland and Other Poems (London: Broadview,
2010), 46.
4. Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1965), 171.
5. Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell, VAS: An Opera in Flatland
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 18.
6. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant­garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 12.
7. Hannah Arendt, introduction to Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections (New York: Schoken, 1969), 38–9.
8. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 81.
 Notes 289

9. Steve Tomasula, “Genetic Art and the Aesthetics of Biology,”

Leonardo 35, no. 2 (2002): 137.
10. Walter Murch is interviewed in The Cutting Edge: The Magic of
Film Editing, directed by Wendy Apple (2005; Burbank, CA:
Warner Home Video, 2004).
11. Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010), 42.
12. Jackie Orr, “Roundtable Discussion,” at Intersections: Literature,
Technology, Science: Eighth­Annual English Graduate
Organization Conference, Macomb, Western Illinois University
October 22, 2011.
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 INDEX
Abby, Edward, 247
abstract expressionism, 12, 98,
116, 210
Acker, Kathy, 25, 31, 150­158,
166, 281n42; Hannibal
Lecter, My Father, 151; The
Childlike Life of the Black
Tarantula by the Black
Tarantula 151; The Adult
Life of Toulouse Lautrec,
152­153
Adamowicz, Elza, 275n24
Ades, Dawn, 70, 271n40, 277
n11
Adorno, Theodor, 222
advertising, 11, 13, 16, 19, 28,
30, 35, 37­42, 56, 60, 62, 90­
95, 99, 114, 107­ 109, 255,
278n22; and Duchamp, 71­
72, 271n40; military
recruiting posters, 121­122;
and dada, 125­127, 130; in
surrealism, 137­144; and
Linder, 160
Agamben, Giorgio, 145, 280
n31
alienation, 14, 42, 146, 147,
174, 201, 217­218, 261
Alloway, Lawrence, 60­61
American Society of
Independent Artists, 67
Anderson, Benedict, 83­84, 90,
121­122, 272n5
Ant Farm, 212­215
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 82
Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung
(AIZ), 127­33
Arendt, Hannah, 250­251
Aragon, Louis, 81­82, 134
Arnold, Matthew, 222, 285n1
art history, 18, 42
The Art of Assemblage, see
William C. Sietz
assembly lines, 11, 15, 16, 26,
28, 29, 48­49, 51, 54, 56, 63,
70, 260, 264
assemblage, see collage
aura, 11, 76, 84­86, 87, 101,
258­259, 261­262
306
automatic writing, 106, 278
n16, n20
automatons, 54­55, 269n23
Automerica, 212, 285n30
avant­garde, 17, 25­26, 33, 51,
61, 64, 71, 81­120, 121, 146,
167, 168, 173, 200, 215,
264, 276n1, 277n9, 280n36
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 89
Balakian, Anna, 274n23
Baldwin, Craig, 173, 186, 187
Barraque, Jean, 168
Barthes, Roland, 124, 130, 276
n7, 276n8
Baudrillard, Jean, 16, 27­28,
61, 63, 66,145, 173, 265n5,
280n32; fatal strategy, 13,
140; For a Critique of the
Political Economy of the
Sign, 27, 57­58, 269n27;
“The System of Collecting,”
180­181,188; The System of
Objects, 191­193; The
Conspiracy of Art, 189­190,
210
Bauhaus, 60
Bazin, André, 123­124, 132,
276n6
The Beatles, 167­171
Beck, 187­188
Beethoven, Ludwig, 168
Beiles, Sinclair, 275n29
Banash
Bell, Daniel, 26; The Cultural
Contradictions of
Capitalism, 26­27, 63, 137,
270n31
Benjamin, Walter, 32, 46, 76,
139, 173, 183, 250­251;
“The Storyteller,” 84­85, 272
n7, 272n8; “The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” 84­85, 87,
133, 199­200, 258, 261­262,
272n5, n6; “Theses on the
Philosophy of History,” 171,
203­207; “Unpacking My
Library,” 179­180, 188­189,
251; The Arcades Project,
179­180, 185
Bergson, Henri, 88
Berkeley, Busby, 51
The Blind Man, 67­69
Beiles, Sinclair, 112
Binet, Alfred, 247­249
bio­art, 255­256
The Black Album, see Jay­Z
Bockris, Victor, 177
Bogdanovich, Peter, 174
Bois, Yves­Alain, 116­117, 275
n33
Boon, Marcus, 260, 263
Borges, Jorge Luis, 102, 145
Bourdieu, Pierre, 27
Braque, Georges, 87­88
Brecht, Bertolt, 134
 Index
Breton, André, 81­82, 86, 104,
112, 141­142, 143, 188, 274
n23, 278n16, 279n27;
Soluble Fish, 105­109;
“Manifesto of Surrealism,”
136, 140, 265n3; Nadja,
137­138
Brewster, Bill, 187
Brockelman, Thomas P., 27,
266n12, 267n4, 274n20
Brooks, Cleanth, 245­246
Brooks, David, 72; On
Paradise Drive, 72, 271n41
Brottman, Mikita, 284n24
Broughton, Frank, 187
Bürger, Peter, 66
Burroughs, William S., 16, 30,
112, 149, 151, 153, 166­167,
168, 265n4, 275n26; cut­up
technique, 110; Minutes to
Go, 110­115
Cabaret Voltaire, 82, 133
Cadillac Ranch, see Ant Farm
Cage, John, 116, 275n31
Caliban, 60
California, 224, 235­237; also
see Los Angeles
Camfield, William, 270n35
camp, 60­61, 63, 284n14
Capote, Truman, 118
Chaplin, Charlie, 32, 237; The
Kid, 232­233; Modern
307
Times; 233­234; City Lights;
234­235, 287n22
Chicago, 227
Christie, Agatha, 150­151, 155,
164, 260
Churchill, Winston, 252
Cline, Patsy, 33
Clueless, see Amy Heckerling
Cocteau, Jean, 82
codes, 16, 27, 29, 57­58, 258,
259
Cody, Heidi, 35­42, 71, 267n2;
American Alphabet, 39­42;
American Haiku­The
Mountain, 35­39
cold war, 125, 209­211
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 48
collage: as allegory, 31, 139,
180­181, 185; assemblage,
14, 16, 18, 32, 63, 70­ 78,
105, 132­133, 138, 140­143,
181, 199, 200­202, 208, 211,
244, 266n10; cut­ups, 16, 28,
30, 104­105, 110­115, 149­
150, 158, 166, 200, 256; as
cutting­edge, 263­264; as
dialectic, 28, 178, 181, 243­
244; definition of, 14, 276
n1; and DJs, 187; and
fragments, 47­51; as
metaphor, 14, 18, 166, 200­
211; papier collé, 14, 15, 16,
18, 19, 181; photomontage,
308
14, 121­137, 277n11, n13; as
plagiarizing, 31, 151, 156,
281n42; as practice,143­165;
and sampling, 17, 166, 168­
170, 187, 282n51; also see
copying, collecting, gleaning
collecting, 31, 73, 78, 173­216,
244, 251
consumption, 11­17, 20­23, 33­
79, 48­49, 56­60, 115­116,
125, 143­144, 153­171, 174­
176, 190­191, 198, 200­203,
207­208, 254­255, 268n16
commodity form, 12­14, 16,
28, 32, 33­42, 61­63, 76, 84,
95, 137­142, 158­165, 169,
189, 190, 202­212, 218, 218­
220, 255­257, 268n17
Connor, Bruce, 186
copying, 17, 28­29, 32, 105,
151, 156, 246­264
Cornell, Joseph, 173, 178, 182­
187, 190, 201; Taglioni’s
Jewel Casket, 183­185;
Medici Slot Machine, 185;
Penny Arcade Portrait of
Lauren Bacall, 185; Rose
Hobart, 186­188
Corso, Gregory, 112
Coupland, Douglas, 203­207,
254
Cox, Neil, 70
cubism, 30, 87­98, 262, 273n10
Banash
Currie, James, R., 162­163,
281n47
Dachy, Mark, 276n2
dada, 13, 30, 50, 60, 74, 81­83,
91, 98­107, 110, 113, 121­
137, 143, 156, 173, 200,
208, 244, 246, 256, 269n28,
277n11, n13
Dalí, Salvador, 142­143
Danger Mouse, 167­171, 282
n51
Davis, Mike, 280
de Certeau, Michel, 25, 222­
223, 269n25
de Duve, Thierry, 70
de Livois, René, 91­92, 273n13
Dean, James, 152
Debord, Guy, 144­150, 165,
279n29, 280n30, 280n33,
280n35
Deisroth, Barbara, 177
Delany, Samuel, 280n36
DeLillo, Don, 173;
Underworld, 193, 208­212;
White Noise, 211­212
dérive, 146­149, 153, 155
Derrida, Jacques, 269n21
détournement, 146, 149­150,
155
Dickens, Charles, 244
DJs, 187
Dos Passos, John, 119, 272n9
 Index
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 89­90
Drucker, Johanna, 111, 275n28
Duchamp, Marcel, 12­14, 22­
24, 29, 72, 74, 143, 183,
189, 201, 255, 259, 271n39,
271n40; Bicycle Wheel, 64­
67, 270n33; Comb, 70;
Fountain, 67­70, 270n37,
n38; Nude Descending a
Staircase, 67; LHOOQ, 258
Dunham, Carroll, 276n33
Dust Brothers, 170
Earl, Harley, 213
Edison, Thomas, 56, 221
Egypt, 43­47
eighteenth century, 20
Eisenberg, Evan, 187, 219­220
Eliot, T. S., 119, 244, 274n9;
The Waste Land, 244­246
Ellis, Bret Easton, 222
Ellison, Ralph, 220­221
Éluard, Paul, 82
Ernst, Max, 25­26, 243;
“Beyond Painting” 25­26,
265n17
Evasion, 223­227
everyday life, 14, 25
Eyerman, J. R., 145
facebook, 261­262
Fairey, Shepard, 116
309
fascism, 31, 125, 129, 143,
152, 158
Federman, Raymond, 119, 166
Le Figaro Illustré, 94
film, 11, 14, 17, 18, 28, 29, 32,
48, 50, 53, 54, 62, 90, 123,
139, 166, 173­176, 178, 182,
199; and editing, 257­258;
found­footage, 32, 54, 186­
187, 215­216; also see
Charlie Chaplin, William B.
Hale, and Orson Welles
fine art, 11, 16­18, 23, 30, 89,
115, 203, 212, 262, 263
Fitch, Janet, 201­203, 254
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 232
flatness, 98­103, 274n20
follies, 47­48
Ford, Henry, 15, 50, 221, 265
n1, 268n19
Fordism, 14­17, 26, 50, 140,
259
Foucault, Michel, 252­255
Fowles, John, 176
Franklin, Benjamin, 221
Freegans, 227
Fresh Kills Landfill, 193, 195,
208, 211
Freud, Sigmund, 43, 180, 188;
Civilization and Its
Discontents, 226
Frye, Northrop, 20, 265n6
futurism, 98
310
Geb, 43
genealogy 252­255
Generation X, see Douglas
Coupland
Gibson, William, 152
Les Glaneuses, see Jean­
Françoise Millet
gleaning, 17, 32, 49, 195, 217­
242, 286n16
Goldsmith, Kenneth, 117­118,
276n34
Gravity’s Rainbow, see
Thomas Pynchon
The Great Gatsby, see F. Scott
Fitzgerald
The Great Train Robbery, see
Edwin S. Porter
Greenberg, Clement, 97­101,
273n16, 273n17
The Grey Album, see Danger
Mouse
grids, 100­102, 115, 250
Grosz, George, 126­127, 132,
156, 164, 277n11, n13
Gruen, Victor, 20
Gulliver’s Travels, see
Jonathan Swift
Guthrie, W. K. C., 45, 267n8
Gysin, Brion, 30, 110­115, 275
n26; Minutes to Go, 112­115
Hale, William B., 236, 238­240
Banash
Hamilton, Richard, 58; Just
What Is It That Makes
Today’s Homes So Different,
So Appealing? 58­63, 69
Hare, Tom, 43­44
Harries, Elizabeth, 47
Harries, Karsten, 27, 266n12
Hassan, Ihab, 46, 267n11
Hausmann, Raoul, 121­125,
126, 127, 131­132, 208 269
n22, 277n11; Mechanical
Head: The Spirit of our
Time, 51­55, 58, 62­63
Hayden, Delores, 280n36
Hearst, William Randolph, 174
Heartfield, John, 31, 125­133,
156, 164, 165, 277n11, 277
n13; Millions Are Standing
Behind Me or Little Man
Asks for Big Gifts, 128­130
Heckerling, Amy, 266n8
Heidegger, Martin, 169
hip­hop, 169, 170, 200
Hitler, 127­131, 135, 252
Hðch, Hannah, 125, 127, 133,
135, 208, 277n11
Hollywood, 11, 13, 56, 97, 186,
200, 244, 288n1
Hopkins, David, 70
Hopps, Walter, 270n33
Hugnet, Georges, 125, 276n9
Hume, David, 48
 Index
ideology, 17, 25­26, 28, 30­31,
43, 50, 123­24, 125, 144,
154, 173, 210, 246, 251, 256
Illustrierter Beobachter, 130­
131
In Praise of Copying, see
Marcus Boon
International Exposition of
Surrealism, 142­143
The Invisible Man, see Ralph
Ellison
Isis, 43­44, 50
Jackson, Cindy, 255
Jacob, Max, 82
Jameson, Fredric, 27, 97, 99­
101, 169
Jarrell, Randall, 168
Jay­Z, 170­171
Jolson, Al, 62
Jorn, Asger, 148
journaux crevés, 102­103
Joyce, James, 118
kabbalah, 42, 49, 252;
shevirah, 46­47, 173, 261­
262
Kac, Eduardo, 256
Kachur, Lewis, 142­143
Kael, Pauline, 174
Kahn, Douglas, 126, 277n10,
n13
311
The Kandy­Kolored Tangerine­
Flake Streamline Baby, see
Tom Wolfe
Keats, John, 230
Kerouac, Jack, 118, 193­194
King, William Davies, 174,
201, 211; Collections of
Nothing, 190­199
Kissinger, Henry, 152
kitsch, 75, 97­98, 187, 194,
202, 212
Knickerbocker, Conrad, 166
Koons, Jeff, 190
Kracauer, Siegfried, 51, 134
Krauss, Rosalind, 89, 97, 100­
101, 133­134, 137, 250, 274
n20, 278n16
Kriebel, Sabine, 127, 130, 277
n12, 278n14
Kubla Kahn, see Samuel Taylor
Coleridge
Kuenzli, Rudolf E. 279n24,
282n51
Lacan, Jacques, 180, 268n15
landscapes, 19, 24, 37­38, 39,
98, 101, 108­109, 147, 156,
169, 209, 212, 240
Latham, Robert, 181, 268n19
Lautréamont, Comte de, 15, 95
Lautrec, Toulouse, 152
Lavin, Maud, 277n9
Le Corbusier, 60
312
Lears, Jackson, 139, 279n23
Lecter, Hannibal, 176
Lefebvre, Henri, 269n25
Lévi­Strauss, Claude, 21­22,
37, 265­266n7
Life of an American Fireman,
see Edwin S. Porter
Linde, Ulf, 270n33
Linder, 156­165
Little Richard, 209
Los Angeles, 202, 235­242,
280n36
Lotringer, Sylvère, 155
Ludus, 158
Luria, Isaac, 46
Lynch, Kevin, 100­102
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 81, 96­97,
99, 100, 102, 105, 107, 117,
118, 273n10
Malt, Johanna, 138, 278n21
Manchester, 156, 158
Mankiewicz, Herbert J., 174
mannequins, 140­143, 279n24
Manson Family, 167
Marsh, Stanley, 212­213
Marx, Karl, 35, 43, 50, 70,
139­140, 146; The Economic
and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844, 216­
218, 285n1
mass media, 11­21, 26­28, 50,
Banash
121, 124­126, 127, 131, 133,
135, 152, 222, 246, 258
mass production, 11­13, 26, 28­
30, 33, 41, 51, 55, 63, 66,
69, 101, 105, 216, 227, 246,
257­259, 270n31
Mazda, 137­38, 142
McCormick, Harold Fowler,
174
McDonough, Thomas, 148­
149, 280n37
McKinney, Devin, 168
McLeod, Kembrew, 171
McLuhan, Marshall, 48­50, 53­
54, 61, 63, 89­90, 118, 169,
200, 268n18, 269n21, n22,
n28
mechanical reproduction, 11,
12, 84, 86­87, 99, 100, 185,
258; also see Walter
Benjamin, “The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction”
middle class, 195­196, 158,
191, 194­196, 225
Miles, Barry, 275n27
Millaud, Moïse, 91­92
Millet, Jean­François, 231­232
Mitchell, W. J. T., 122, 276n4
modernism, 20­31, 40­55, 60,
64­71, 82­110, 113, 118,
119, 121­143, 146­147, 173­
 Index
190, 221, 232­235, 244­246,
257­260, 274n20
Mondrian, Piet, 60, 101
Monroe, Marilyn, 60­61
Montoya, Joseph, 241
Moody, Rick, 196
Moorman, Charlotte, 260­261
MTV, 17
Mumbo Jumbo, see Ishmael
Reed
Murch, Walter, 257
music, 11, 14, 17, 18, 25, 44,
45­46, 74, 75, 88, 97, 99,
149, 152, 166­171, 186, 187,
188, 209, 218­220; also see
Evan Eisenberg, Bill
Brewster, hip­hop and punk
musique concréte, 167, 169,
200, 222, 281n47
mythology, 29, 42­47
Napster, 260
nature, 19­25, 35, 37­38, 49,
51, 98, 101, 105, 108­109,
137, 147, 260, 265n7
La nature, 137
Nazis, 127, 129­133, 143, 144,
158, 253, 277n12
Nelson, Madeline, 228
New York, 67, 73, 92, 143,
152, 220, 227
The New York Times, 117
313
newspapers, 11, 30, 50, 53, 55,
81­119, 121­22; and avant­
garde, 81­83, 86, 90­91; in
cubism, 87­90; as mass
medium, 91­95; as
modernity 83­85, 272n9;
versus digital copies, 259
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 43, 45­46,
267n10; The Genealogy of
Morals, 230­231
Norton, Louise, 69
nostalgia, 17, 31­32, 147, 173­
216, 249­251, 261, 272n8
Nut, 43
Oginz, Rick, 241, 287n27
Oldham, Tod, 283n14
Olson, Charles, 151
On the Road, see Jack Kerouac
Onassis, Jacqueline, 153
Ono, Yoko, 260; Promise
Piece, 260­262
Oprah’s Book Club, 201
Orpheus, 42, 44­47
Orr, Jackie, 263
Osiris, 42, 43­47
outsider art, 32
P­Orridge, Genesis, 110
Packard, Vance, 56, 72; The
Waste Makers, 56­57, 225
Panorama Ephemera, 187
314
Paris, 21, 64, 67, 81­83, 91­95,
102, 107, 110, 142, 147­148,
152
Paz, Octavio, 66, 270n34
Le Petit Journal, 92
Pfeiffer, Michelle, 201
photography, 30­31, 48, 50, 53,
122­125
Picabia, Francis, 50­51, 82
Picasso, Pablo, 25, 86­91, 98,
105, 109
Playboy, 285n4
Poggi, Christine, 87­88, 273
n10
Porter, Edwin S. 257
Poussin, Nicolas, 230
pop art, 29, 60, 71, 143, 177
postmodernism, 60, 71, 73,
110, 112, 150, 152, 205, 266
n12
pornography, 152, 153, 154,
158, 160, 164
Pound, Ezra, 119
The Practice of Everyday Life,
see Michel de Certeau
Pratt Artist’s League, 73
Prelinger, Rick, 186­187
production, 11­30, 33­54, 56,
63­72, 257­260; also see
Fordism and mass
production
psychogeography, 148­150,
151, 155­156, 165
Banash
punk, 32, 149, 156­165, 173,
227­228, 286n11
Pust, Hans­Christian, 276n5
Pynchon, Thomas, 267n5
Pyramid Texts, 43
radio, 11, 28, 50, 90
Rat Patrol, 227­228
Rauschenberg, Robert, 30, 116­
117, 118, 208, 275n33
readymades, 19; definition of,
21­25, 37­42; and Duchamp,
63­73, 279n28; and
surrealism, 137­143; and
Baudrillard, 189­190; and
the novel, 166, 210; DNA as
readymade, 252; and
commodity form, 255
ready­made materials, 12, 13,
16; and the raw and the
cooked, 19­23; and Picasso
and Braque, 87­90; and
critique, 144; and
situationists, 149­150; and
music, 169­171; and
collecting, 181­183; and
McLuhan’s cool, 200; and
copyright, 208, and
commodity form, 211; and
gleaning, 220
ready­to­eat food, 22
Rebel Without a Cause, 152
Reed, Ishmael, 267n5
 Index
reservistenbild, 121­25, 131,
165
La Révolution surréaliste, 136
Ribemont­Dessaignes,
Georges, 82, 272n3
Rimbaud, Arthur, 26
Robbie the Robot, 60­61
Robbins, Harold, 152­155, 281
n42
Rockefeller, Nelson, 56
Rodia, Sam 235­242, 287n25
romanticism, 12, 13, 19, 25,
47­49, 95, 105, 131, 141,
147, 182, 183
Romero, George, 190
Rushdie, Salman, 237, 287n24
Ruth, 229­230, 237
Salmon, André, 82
salon des indépendents, 67
Sainte­Beuve, Charles
Augustin, 95­96, 273n14
Sanouillet, Michel, 271n1
Sartre, Jean­Paul, 37­38, 39,
166, 169, 284n23
Sauceda, Louis, 241
Schlegel, Friedrich, 47, 267n13
Schneiderman, Davis, 282n51
Scholem, Gershom, 46, 267n12
Schwarz, Arturo 270n33
Sears, Roebuck and Company
Catalog, 211
The Secret Public, 160
315
Seltzer, Mark, 50, 268n19
serial killers, 26, 243­244, 288
n1
Shakespeare, William, 152
Shampoo Planet, see Douglas
Coupland
Sherman, Cindy, 283n14
shoplifting, 32, 203
shopping, 16, 28, 37, 56, 58,
61, 66­67, 71, 78, 171, 203,
211­212
shopping carts, 16, 20, 37, 78
Sibelius, Jean, 168
Seitz, William C., 63, 270n32
The Silence of the Lambs, 243
Sitney, P. Adams, 186
situationist international, 145­
150, 153, 173, 280n33, n36
Solomon, Deborah, 183, 283
n11
Sontag, Susan, 60, 270n30
Sotheby’s, 177
Soupault, Philippe, 82
spectacle, 144­151, 158, 160,
164­166, 257
Stein, Gertrude, 273n19
Stieglitz, Alfred, 67
Steinberg, Leo, 275n33
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 167­
168
Summer: Ruth and Boaz, see
Nicolas Poussin
316
surrealism, 13, 15, 25, 74, 98,
110, 113, 133­143, 249;
automatic writing, 106­109,
278n20; newspaper poems,
105­109
Swift, Jonathan, 33­35, 266n1
Sze, Sarah, 29, 64, 71­79, 271
n44; Proportioned to the
Groove, 75­76; Ripe Fruit
Falling, 74­75; Seamless,
75; Studio, 75; Things Fall
Apart, 78­79
tactics, 11, 222­223
tailfins, 212­213
Tape­Beatles, 173; An
Expanded Cinema
Presentation for Three
Projectors and Sound, 215­
216
Taylor, Brandon, 269n28, 270
n29
taylorization, 26, 137, 140
Teitelbaum, Matthew, 130­131,
278n15
television, 11, 21, 28, 61, 62,
100, 160, 166
Terminator X, 170
Them, 187
This is Tomorrow, 60
Tiller Girls, 51
Time Square Red, Time Square
Blue, see Samuel Delany
Banash
tinkers, 67, 220­223, 227, 237
Tomasula, Steve, 246­257
Tretyakov, Sergei, 134
True Confessions, 151, 153
typewriters, 23, 48, 221
Tzara, Tristan, 81­82, 90­91,
100, 102, 104­106, 135, 244,
274n21; recipe for dada
poem, 104­105, 244
Van Gogh, Vincent, 152
Varda, Agnès, 232, 286n5
VAS: An Opera In Flatland: A
Novel, see Steve Tomasula
Vietnam War, 195
Wal­Mart, 19, 20, 76
Warhol, Andy, 12­14, 71, 116,
173, 177­178, 182, 188, 189,
211
Washington, George, 253
waste, 17, 19, 49, 56­57, 72,
73, 208, 220, 225­228
Waters, John, 187, 282n14
Watts Towers, 235­242, 287n27
Welles, Orson, 31, 174; Citizen
Kane, 31, 174­177, 188, 191,
220
The White Album, see The
Beatles
White Oleander, see Janet Fitch
Whitman, Walt, 168
Williams, William Carlos, 119
 Index 317

Wilson, Edmund, 272n2

Wilson, Terry, 275n30
Windham, Donald, 183
Witt, R. E., 267n7
Wolfe, Tom, 212­213
Wolman, Gil, 149
Wollen, Peter, 269n22, 270n31
Wordsworth, William, 48
World War I, 50, 67, 70, 82, 87,
125
World War II, 56
Wright Brothers, 257­258

Zellweger, Renée, 201

Zines, 224­227
Zoroastrianism, 137­138