The Feminist History of Collage (Part 3)

Why Does the Caged Girl Sing?

In my previous article, I discussed the way in which female artists rebelled, empowered, and declared themselves as legitimate through their collage works during the rise of Second Wave Feminism from the 1960’s to the late 1980’s. Through various feminist movements ranging from the Vietnam War protests, to civil rights and abortion access, collage empowered women from multiple marginalized groups to demand to be seen as legitimate and indispensable participants of society. With more of these movements gaining traction and normalization, more women of different classes, races, sexual orientation, gender expressions, and other social intersections began to mix in contemporary society. As the birth of the intersectional Third Wave Feminist movement began between the late 1990’s to early 2010’s and continues today, the question of how personal identity and social identity, or the way we see ourselves versus the way we are seen in society, connect and separate individuals in a group or movement and how the two identities inform or contradict each other began to appear in contemporary collage art. With the internet allowing the free flow of information, opinion, exchange, and debate, more and more of the individual sense of self is informed by others outside of our ‘regular’ social identity. These exposures to new ways of being and seeing the world combine intersectionality and individualism in ways previously unseen.

One of the first places we as people look to determine identity is in our shared past and the in the way that story is told; whether it be a familial, social, or national history, the way in which we interact with and contextualize these stories has a deep impact on our sense of self and the world at large. Although these retellings can bind groups of people together in their collective sense of narrative representation, it also risks the ‘other’ as reducing those in the ingroup to a single monolith and/or a collection of stereotypes, when in reality, the ingroup is made of people with both individual and collective experiences and identities. Through the union of these intersectional, yet, fragmented identities, various contemporary artists aim to reconcile these many senses and constructions of ‘the self’ and the role of ‘the other’ in their works and identities in an increasingly interconnected world.

View fullsize

Kara Walker, 1994, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart,

Kara Walker, an American mixed media artist that explores the convergence of her historically and socially given identities tied to being a Black woman, as well as her personal ones that come from her lived experience with modern racism and sexism infuses the combination of collective and individual identity in her art and how these past prejudices affect identity in the modern world. In her pieces Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, she creates life sized silhouetted landscapes made from black cut-paper depicting various scenes from the Antebellum South and explores these stories implications in contemporary social identity.

Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart specifically takes much of its inspiration and scenery from the 1939 novel by Margaret Mitchell, Gone in the Wind, which glorified the way of life in white, upper class society and many racial stereotypes against enslaved peoples in the state of Georgia and the South in general before the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. These panoramic wall installations allow her to depict the extremely violent realities of African Americans during this time, as well as to process and pass down these historical stories that have formed part of the Black identity in America, and speak to how individual identities can be ‘erased’ or ‘blacked out’ amongst the collective story. The visual simplicity of the characters in these scenes also allow for the viewer of the piece to take in the scene slowly as before they move closer; without a detailed look, we can make out what appears to be a couple embracing on the left , a child potentially fishing on the shore while a woman sails in a boat away from more ambiguous figures on the right in the piece. However, it is not until the viewer can take a long, close look at the work for it to transform fully from childlike, fairy tale imagery into scenes bursting with physical, sexual, and racial violence. The ambiguous figures from the right side of the piece reveal graphic depictions of sexual assault with the young girl performing fellactio on the man while he gazes at the levitating woman being molested mid air, below her, we see a woman ‘popping’ out babies, leaving them to fall haphazardly in the river while a man beats an enslaved woman. Even the embracing couple is no longer innocent as the realization of the man’s sword tip is no accident, but rather a sharp reference to rape & sodomy, as the point of the blade aligns directly and almost touches the genital region of the young child by the shore.

Once made aware of the totality of the scenes before them, the silhouettes void of any personal characteristics or identifiers also work as a way for audience members to ‘project’ parts of their identities onto the figures, allowing them to go from viewing these events as both reflections of a group of people’s history, to the history and experiences of several individuals. The juxtaposition between these violent depictions of the Antebellum South and the idyllic nature of silhouette portraiture (which was a very popular art in the 19th century in the South ) also speaks to the way that these stories and the realities of enslaved Americans have been brushed over and looked through with rose-color lenses in works that idealize this time, such as the novel that inspired the work, Gone With the Wind and the legacy that these retellings, brutally accurate or ignorantly romanticized, have on contemporary Black identity. This piece also allows us to experience the scene as both ‘the other,’ as without a close look or complete context, the imagery seems to be a romantic silhouetted landscape, perhaps depicting a scene from a love story or pastoral scene as despite the violence occurring, the vignettes have a certain stillness to them that fosters a false sense of safetly or calmness. We also experience it from the ‘in group,’ as when we get closer to the pieces, seeing the details of each of the vignettes, we are able to experience the agony and violence of these stories that have been passed down through the perpetrators and descendants of these colonial histories on a personal, individual level which have trickled in part into the collective social identity of Black Americans.

While the ‘Other’ seems to always have the upperhand in defining marginalized groups and their social identity, in the past 20 years, many groups have been engaging in redefining themselves in spite of the projections on their experiences and identities. One of the pioneering groups to engage in this kind of self identification and the preservation of their social histories and identities has been the LGBTQIA+ community; especially amongst Transwomen of color, who have to work though not only external judgement of their intersectional identities, but also the erasure of their individuality in their experiences and the often neglected history of their peers. Without a formal, easily accessible ‘history’ to find representation and community in, many LGBTQIA+ people must form their identities, both social and personal, from other sources; often either from the influence of their chosen families, or in their attempts to either enact or empower themselves against the identity given to them by ‘the Other.’ This duel for the role of determiner of these social identities consists of marginalized people being defined and overpowered by the external, personifying these social identities which have been assigned to them to ‘fit in’ or be accepted (as failure to socially pass can lead to further discrimination, ostracization, or violence.) To then shift to reappropriating and redefining what their social identities mean for themselves and eventually, collectively for the group without external input; as the ‘Other’ has to recalibrate and reinvent a new understanding and projection onto that group, starting the cycle again.

View fullsize

Giuseppe Campuzano, 2012, Tropo [Trope]

View fullsize

Giuseppe Campuzano, 2012, Cifra [Number]

Giuseppe Campuzano (he/they pronouns,) a philosopher, drag queen, photographer, artist, and founder of the traveling Museo Travesti de Peru [The Transvestite Museum of Peru,] dedicated their life to the research, creation, collection and transmission of trans, non-binary, and androgynous histories and identities in Peruvian culture through their artworks, activism, and relentless devotion to creating an empowering a social and historical narrative for these socially marginalized groups.

They use collage as one way to investigate the question how of trans and non-binary identities are represented in history and society while analyzing the way in which this kind of media reporting shapes social identity. In their collages Tropo [Trope] and Cifra [Number], Giuseppe highlights the way in which the language used in South American media outlets compose these identities through the erasure of the individual and the fetishizationof the body by using derogotory headlines to literally frame these portraits. In Tropos they use these newspaper headline cut outs featuring phrases like: “‘Gays’ callejeros,’” [stray ‘gays,'] '“vestido de mujer /gays escandalosos/ transexuales” [dressed as a woman/scandalous gays/ transexuals] and “Hombres con delirio de ser mujer” [men with the delusion of being women] which espouses the erroneous stereotype that transfolk, particularly transwomen, are confused gay men or perverse men masquerading as women; these stereotypes not only erase the concepts of gender fluidity and trans identities, especially Indigenous traditions of third gender people, they also serve as a way to reduce the individual to their ‘misaligned’ body and sexuality. Cifra,functions similarly to Tropos in that it erases the individual and upholds sexually delinquent stereotypes of gay people with headlines such as: “10% de Peruanos/mil detenidos/ cientos de homosexuales” [10% of Peruvians/ a thousand detainees/ hundreds of homosexuals] , “cinco balazos/ cuatro testimonios/ por un sol” [five bullet holes/ 4 testimonies/ for one sol], or “Miss Hispanidad Gay ‘96/operación mariposa [Miss Gay Hispanidad ‘96/operation butterfly]; as well as incite fear into heteronormative society by reducing them to a ‘growing’ statistic of uncontrollable and dangerous gay men. While both these pieces are reflective of how the language by the Other in positions of power and the way in which some of these stereotypes are formed, they each work two show two different ways that they are stripped of their personal identities. Tropos works as a way to illustrate how the Other separates the individual from their identity and removes the possibility of social integration by focusing on the foreignation their trans bodies as well as conflating sexuality and gender expression. Cifra doesn’t attempt to see the homosexual or their bodies as necessarily alien, but rather to reduce them to a ‘foreboding,’ criminal statistic; in this projection of their identity, gay men are either reduced to feminized, ‘fake’ men, or as dangerous criminals, both of which challenge the colonial, heteronormative social interactions in Peru.

In an article published by the Guggenheim Museum as a tribute to them and their contribution to Trans representation and LGBTQIA+ history after their death in 2013, Giuseppe’s life and artistic goals are described as:

"[he] wants to relate history all over again. He wants to unfold the bitchy version, the one with mascara running down its face. He wants to tell us all the stories that were taken from us.... Giuseppe began to wonder about the lost ancestors of his joyful transvestite body. This question...stems from a reaction to the lack of recognizable representations in official Peruvian history... His commitment to confronting the persecution of his own outlawed transgender community, and his obsession with the development of vernacular codes and historical characters, crystallized rapidly into a series of questions about the politics of the representation of his/their/our weird body/bodies...It was precisely his personal questioning of the role of the transvestite in the media and in official history that brought Giuseppe to initiate this visual, historical, and philosophical archeology of his origins." 

While their collages dealt with the first half of their goals in confronting why trans & non-binary people aren’t accepted, the relationship of the body to identity, and how the politics of this socialization through mass media effect these individuals, their work towards developing and touring the Museo Travesti de Peru into different cities was the answer to the second part of their life’s work; which was to collect, reappropriate, and record a history of their trans, non-binary, and third gendered communities. This Museum, which is a living assemblage of histories, clothing, traditional dances, artworks and archives of press reports, aims to look at Peruvian history through a queer, post-colonial lense and to place control of self identification, empowerment, and self determination into the hands of LGBTQIA+ people in Peru.

As the ability to get news, connect with others, and have access to most information at the touch of a button becomes inseparable from our modern way of life, the sources of what and who influences our identities has grown exponentially, allowing for different parts of identity to be explored and developed. Previously unseen and unheard marginalized identities are using social media in order to not only connect with each other and educate where they could, but also to represent themselves, as themselves fully, as opposed to having to go through and hope that mainstream channels represent them in good faith and authentically. As more people are exposed to honest reflections of individuals and others, it allows for some of the social stigma to be lifted and for people to explore unthought of or hidden aspects of identity, which in turn, lets people ‘try on,’ experiment, and individually determine from many forms and signifiers of identities what is ‘right’ for them.

View fullsize

Gabriela Motta, 2023, Desmonta I

View fullsize

Gabriela Motta, 2023, Sharp Cut Out

Gabriela Motta [aka GABE,] a Brazilian born mixed media artist who has lived in France since 2016, has used collage over the last 10+ years as a way to explore modern forms of identity creation within herself and her peers. Through the combination of the internet/social media’s ability to broaden who and what is given a platform and a her multi-cultural and linguistic experience in Brazil & France, she analyzes the ways in which the exposure to different intersections of identities influence the formation and contextualization of the self through the act of assembling an identity from many sources. She describes the process of constructing the identity from many places as:

"...These intersections produce an incredibly fertile soil to explore and experiment with different ways of navigating existence, in particular as we experience Otherness. This process, too, cuts across social groups we pertain to: family, country of origin, mother- tongue, social class, culture. These interactions result in a complex system that is human identity (identitIES). Within this framework, selfhood is understood as a combination of by-products of environmental experiences which enables reformulation and reassembling of the parts creating a multiplicity of social and theatrical characters. Yet, as we play life, established systems coerce all to solely be and perform within walls of tiny boxes to sustain prescribed and regulated narratives. It's a power play. And, for us, a dance between agency and performance..."

This idea of reformulating and reassembling of identity is best depicted in her work Desmonta I; the title comes from the Portuguese verb “montar” which means to drag up, dress up, or put together, making ‘desmontar’ take on the meaning of to strip, remove, or take apart. With this idea of identity construction in mind, Desmonta I is a visual reminder that the ammaglimations of our identities, while our choice in displaying and determining, are costumes that we put on to represent something made of many parts of the self as a whole. The face of the subject, which is a fusion of different heads, hairlines, and eyes refuses the viewer the ability to ignore the fractures where features are joined together, while simultaneously creating a ‘complete’ and recognizable human face. The larger left side of the face appears blissfully unaware and content in its consumption of the yellow paper (which is a timeline of events in the 19th century,) while the smaller right side of the face stares directly at the viewer, seemingly mindful of what it is taking in. The assembled yet complete face, divided in half by both its construction as well as its consciousness, speaks to the dance between performance and agency in modern personal identity formation. We all take in the culture, attitudes, and codes of the environment and community that surrounds us. In our ever shrinking world however, information about other cultures and approaches to life are easily accessible, allowing for more agency in deciding what/who we are influenced by. These ‘adopted’ or assembled aspects of identity, while chosen, still represent a level of performance as we attempt to transform from the ‘other’ looking into and exploring these unfamiliar cultural spaces, to ‘insider’ as what was once foreign becomes part of us. The more conscious we become of these performances of identity, the more we can strip down to our ‘true identity,’ which like the collage, is an assemblage of many cultural and social interactions that create a fractured whole, that in its abundance of influences, creates something singular and unique.

Her piece Sharp Cut Out, explores the other side of agency, performance, and ‘wholeness’ in identity development by focusing on what is cut away or left behind. Like Desmonta I, the face featured in this piece is split in two and rearranged to create a new version; this face however is marked not by the fusion of many faces and features, but rather by what is lacking, incomplete, or leaving the face. The eyes are not only placed lower on the face and upside down, the irises have been completely removed, and an exacto-knife blade is placed, almost like a tear, falling from the left eye. Behind the now empty sockets, we get a glimpse into the mind’s eye, which shows a seven water jugs strung up idly in a line; and the figure’s mouth, which seemed to consume the past in Desmonta I, instead becomes the egress for an upside man going down the stairs. The combinations of imagery tells the story of discarded or lost forms of identity and the consequences of losing these pieces of ourselves. The center and most striking visual of this is the iris-less eyes and exacto-knife ‘teardrop,’ this imagery depicts the way in which cutting away parts of our identity, we lose a certain ability to contextualize ourselves and others, rendering us incomplete and in subconscious mourning. The eyes, which take in, process, and make sense of our surroundings before we are even conscious of what we are seeing, are rendered useless, no longer able to give that much needed context in order to discern identity; the consequences to not having this context leads to the way in which we label and ‘box’ ourselves and each other into clichéd and banal labels/ preconceived notions of who and what we ought to be, represented by the hanging jugs in the mind’s eye. When our individual sense of self is incomplete, due to either the ‘Other’ cutting away at us, or our own agency to leave things behind, impedes our ability to thrive as completed individuals, or a collective.

This is my final article about the feminist history of collage; I hope, like I did when I was researching for these articles, you learned about new artists, techniques, and are inspired by some of these stories & works. I’ll be back next month with a brand new topic for the next article. Thanks again for reading. :)

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

References & Further Reading:

https://art21.org/read/kara-walker-the-melodrama-of-gone-with-the-wind/

https://www.reseau-canope.fr/art-des-caraibes-ameriques/oeuvres/gone-an-historical-romance-of-a-civil-war-as-it-occurred-btween-the-dusky-thighs-of-one-young-negress-and-her-heart.html

https://www.guggenheim.org/articles/map/museum-musex-mutext-mutant-giuseppe-campuzanos-transvestite-machine

https://artmuseum.williams.edu/collection/featured-acquisitions/giuseppe-campuzano/

https://uwethicsofcare.gws.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/MACHUCA-ROSE-2019.pdf

https://www.visibleproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/workbook_MiguelLopez_high.pdf

https://salutsexual.sidastudi.org/resources/inmagic-img/DD70737.pdf