Many artists throughout the decades devoted themselves to the creation of collages: this technique can be incredibly inspiring and provide us with unique works in different fields such as art and fashion as well. Often collected in scrapbooks, employed to create photomontages or incorporated in paintings, collages could be considered as aggregates of layered images and materials.
New York-based artist, Johanna Goodman, for example, uses the collage technique to create wonderful figures that she calls "Imaginary Beings".
The figures are usually characterised by heads, arms and feet taken from historical images or real pictures. Quite often her aggregate figures have the head of an ancient statue and feet clad in stilettos, sneakers or sandals, anachronisms that create striking contrasts.
The bodies of these figures are instead aggregates formed by a variety of images such as green hills and mountains, rocks, waves and lakes, verdant jungles or compositions of assembled windows, buildings and houses, plus ropes, trees and iridescent sequins.
Among the most recent images there are doctors and nurses, their bodies are made of blister packs of pharmaceutical tablets, images of Coronavirus, graphics, gloves and face masks; then there are political images, figures that incorporate in their bodies photographs of suffragettes protests, women's marches or Black Lives Matter signs.
There are also figures intended as odes to colours and textiles, their bodies integrate a variety of patterns and prints, they are made with quilts and yarns and feature knitted and crocheted swatches.
Goodman studied at Boston University's School of Fine Art and at New York's Parsons School of Design where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration in 1992. She first started painting and drawing, but after working with these mediums for a few years, she felt she was ready for something new and unexpected that may have given her more freedom and she started experimenting with large-scale collages, developing her signature elongated figures.
At the beginning she often employed historical images, but then she started incorporating in her aggregates digital pictures of every day objects she took while walking in the streets.
This practice prompted her to become more aware of her surroundings, appreciate minor details and get inspired by an image, a shape or a colour.
The possibilities proved endless: a cracked strip of asphalt covered in tar was turned into a dress for one of her imaginary characters, while fantasy-scapes made of red glitter and bright pink clouds of smoke became oversized gowns. In this way Goodman's aggregates allowed her to create composite micro-worlds – at times fantastical and imaginary, at others inspired by reality and by contemporary events – within her artworks.
Some of these images were commisisoned by a variety of clients including publications such as Time, Le Monde, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post (you can be sure that this is another artist who will be co-opted by the fashion industry very soon; so far she has done adverts for Ferragamo, but you can already imagine T-shirts with her collages in a collection by Dior, Prada or Valentino).
Collages are two-dimensional, but if you like the idea of aggregates and would like to explore them in three-dimensional artworks check out the recently unveiled sculpture "April is the cruellest month", by Nasher Prize-winning artist Michael Rakowitz.
This life-sized statue is a commission with Turner Contemporary in Margate for the event England's Creative Coast (from tomorrow until 12 November 2021). This art trail along the Essex, Kent and East Sussex coastlines, offers visitors a new outdoor cultural experience to connect art with landscape and local stories with international perspectives. The event includes also Waterfronts, a series of seven site-specific artworks by leading contemporary artists such as Rakowitz, taking the border between land and sea as their inspiration.
The statue on the Margate seafront is engaged in a sort of symbolical dialogue with the Surfboat memorial figure of a lifeguard who gazes out to sea to rescue people and it is overlooked by the shelter where T.S. Eliot wrote part of "The Waste Land" while recovering from a nervous breakdown a hundred years ago (the title of Rakowitz's statue comes from Eliot's poem).
Rakowitz's sculpture is an anti-war monument and a symbol of peace: it is modelled after Daniel Taylor, a young soldier who served with the Royal Artillery in Basra, Iraq, during the Iraq War. His figure is cast out of an aggregate the artist has made from concrete, calcite, sand and earth from Basra with chalk from Margate in which he embedded fossil-like items that embody trauma – military medals and other votive offerings that have been personally donated by Taylor, members of Veterans for Peace UK and by residents of Kent.
This gesture of giving up the medals of war follows in the example of the First World War poet-officer and pacifist Siegfried Sassoon, whom Rakowitz discovered during his research to be his direct ancestor. Sassoon's words are also featured at the sculpture's base: "I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest."
Rakowitz's soldier turns his back on the shore and instead points inland towards London and parliament where the decision to go to war with Iraq was made. Its formal inspiration relates to a Basra memorial of 80 bronze statues of Iraqi soldiers, a memorial to those killed in the Iran-Iraq war, whose fingers pointed accusingly across the Shatt al-'Arab towards Iran where they were felled, and which were removed in April 2003 during the British occupation of Basra.
"April is the cruellest month" is an evolution of those statues and aggregate of anxities, fears, memories and broken hopes. In an official press release for this project Rakowitz stated, "I thought about what happens to the British soldier that sees these authoritarian sculptures being taken off pedestals and thrown into the Shatt al-'Arab by the local population. Do they see themselves in that Iraqi soldier? Do they see themselves in this continuous vector of invaders and occupiers, who will themselves be removed? And so it became something where I began to imagine that sculpture underwater, more or less accumulating all the sea life that attaches to it and then… eventually emerging on the coast of Margate and carrying with it all of the traumatic items in between. And so it became a British soldier, pointing not at some imagined enemy across the sea, but inland, toward Parliament, where the decision to invade Iraq was made."
Rakowitz is not new to aggregates: in 2010 the artist, exhibited a replica of the Ishtar Gate based on a version erected by Saddam Hussein. Rakowitz's Ishtar Gate was made of packaging materials and papier-mâché, a technique he employed for the winged Assyrian lamassu installed in Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth in 2018 and in "The Invisible Enemy" project (2007 – ongoing).
The latter consists in a life-sized reconstruction of the more than 8,000 artefacts from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad that are missing, stolen, destroyed or of status unknown, after it was looted in 2003. The artist and his team recreated these objects using the packaging of food products produced in northern Iraq, such as date cakes and syrup or Arabic newspapers.
Both in Goodman and Rakowitz's case the aggregate materials used, from paper and digital images to food packaging, are the key to the final purpose of their works – producing pieces with a strong and powerful narrative that capture the viewers' attention with their storytelling quality.
Image credits for this post
1 – 11. Artworks by © Johanna Goodman
12 – 15. Michael Rakowitz: 'April is the cruellest month'. A Waterfronts commission with Turner Contemporary for England's Creative Coast. Photo © Thierry Bal.
16 – 17. In progress detail of 'April is the cruellest month', Michael Rakowitz's Waterfronts commission for Margate. To open to the public with Turner Contemporary on Saturday 1 May 2021. Photo © Ben Ryan. Courtesy of England's Creative Coast.
18. Michael Rakowitz, May the Arrogant Not Prevail, 2010. © MCA Chicago.
19. Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, Fourth Plinth, London, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.