Collage and Decollage On a Grand Scale
For convenience we will use the term paper loosely to stand also for light or heavy cardboard or sheet material. A collage is an artwork made by placing papers on a substrate either as complete layers or as bits and pieces to create a design. In contrast, decollage is an artwork made by partially undoing a collage by removing parts of it by peeling, scraping, or abrading. The decollage is interesting in proportion to the piled up layers that can be lifted off in places to reveal various undersheets.
Decollage in French means to lift off. Incidentally, on YouTube the search term decollage brings up videos of airplanes taking off ‒ lifting off ‒ at surprisingly steep angles.
The African American artist Mark Bradford, uses collage and decollage, to make large works which he refers to as paintings. Some of his paper works, composed of many layers, are as large as 9 feet tall by 36 feet wide. for lifting off, he uses knives but also scrapers and power sanders. As the process continues, he can paint or add more layers, as well as remove. The end result goes beyond the appearance of painting, showing fine details, skidding, wear, flecks, abrasions ‒ giving a look of wear and aging. Bradford, at times, also applies paint and even cords, ropes or wires on top of the paper layers.
Such signs are put up by bail bondsmen, pawn shops, payday lenders, sell- your- house- for- cash speculators, and various other scam artists. One sign that caught Bradford’s imagination offered Sexy Cash for your house. Perhaps that means prestige cash, status cash, cash to let loose with, cash to attract people, or cash that will soon be lost.
To shed more light on the South Central L.A. neighborhood, that is where the black man Rodney King was badly beaten by the L.A.P.D. in 1991. The beating was caught on video tape which was widely seen. When eventually the responsible white police officers were put to trial and then acquitted, a violent black riot ensued, to protest police violence, poverty, crime, drugs, and lack of opportunity. To sense the magnitude of the destruction, note that there were 63 people killed, 12,000 arrested, 3,600 fires, and 1,100 buildings destroyed.
Coming from that neighborhood it is understandable that many of Bradford's works relate to black history. His exhibit, from 2015, is rewarding to look into and is called Scorched Earth. It is based on a race riot by whites, who burned down a prosperous black section of Tulsa Oklahoma in 1921.
Please look at one of the works in the exhibit which is called Lights and Tunnels. To appreciate the beauty in the work we show a detail to allow us to see the structure and pattern. How do you think this Bradford work compares in style, rhythm, verve, and complexity to the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock? It is impressive and perplexing how Bradford made all those black dots with little collars of color around each one.
For a further sampling of Bradford’s work we will look at a show of his at the Gementum Museum at the city of the Hague in the Netherlands. The show, called No Time to Expand the Sea, is based on Bradford’s interest in seafaring maps from the 1500s and 1600s. The name of the show may refer loosely to the notion that the explorers at that time were expanding knowledge of the sea in detail and extent, but that is no longer the case.
Please look at the headline painting in the show ‒ No Time to Expand the Sea, which is 8.5 feet by 12 feet.
When I first saw this picture, knowing Bradford’s connection to riots in South Central L.A., I thought it was a depiction of, or an actual broken auto windshield. Note that reflections on glass can be represented quite effectively with white highlights. An alternative interpretation, aside from the artist liking the design, is of two sources of radiating force colliding in the center of the picture.
The fine detail in the picture looks hard to achieve until you consider the large size of the work so that visual fine details from ten or more feet away are seen as doable once you are closer, plus the collage and decollage method can generate a lot of fine non uniform texture. The effect is not achieved by brush alone.
Our next picture from the show is of a harbor fender in front of two pictures from a group of three pictures called a triptych. The fender is a kind of bumper that hangs from a dock or from a ship to prevent damage from the ship and dock rubbing or bumping together. Bradford refers to the fenders as sea pigs which is the name the seafaring Dutch used for porpoises.
The fender, or sea pig, is covered in decollage. Notice the raised lines and splotchy worn blacks and pinks, looking like something that has been left out in the weather. It is hard to see but there is a ring at the top for a rope to hold the fender in place alongside a dock. The splotchy abraded look is also visible in the wall decollages.
Something else is visible that should give thought to conservators. At the lower left of the fender it looks like some of the paper material has loosened or detached. It also seems to indicate that the raised lines on the fender are ropes glued onto the fender and covered with collage. On the other hand, maybe the loose section is deliberate. Time will tell how well Bradford’s large scale collage holds up.
Sexy Cash
Besides the works related to the sea theme, there was another separate area of the museum with a long display of Sexy Cash posters reminding us of South Central L.A. The posters in the show were so colorfully worked over as to be nearly illegible. For our purposes please look at a similar but more legible Bradford poster from a different source.
A Dutch critic thought that the Sexy Cash posters were inappropriate and had no relation to the sea theme of the show, but unknown to him Branford had an interpretation that is unusual and appealing and will be explained shortly.
As background, it helps to know that for 85 years, through the late 1500s and first half of the 1600s, Catholic Spain was at war with the Protestant Netherlands trying to coerce the Netherlands by military force back into embracing Catholicism. Somehow the Netherlands during that time were able to fend off Spain which was the most wealthy and powerful country of the time because of its immense gold and silver acquisitions from the new world.
Besides the Dutch resisting on land, the Dutch naval forces overcame the Spanish on the sea and wrestled the far east spice trade away from the Portuguese who were allied with Spain. From their naval action, the Dutch captured the spice trade and the resulting wealth.
The Dutch merchant class were thus able to build more canals and the finest of buildings built on pilings in Amsterdam as well as to encourage a flowering of trade, architecture, and painting. This period was referred to as the Dutch Golden age. That superb Dutch achievement and resultant wealth puts a new meaning on the South Central phrase ‒ Sexy Cash.
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