Certainly, you have witnessed the following scene. Two people are in front of a collage piece. This is made up of diverse elements and includes multiple materials. At first glance, the elements that make up the piece appear chaotic generating certain assumptions in those who look at it. The most frequent and the one I want to highlight states, “Nothing in this piece makes sense.” A wealth of similar arguments follows from this thesis. “This is nonsense”, “whoever created this piece was not clear about the meaning of it and just let themselves be carried away by chance”, “without a clear meaning, the piece falls outside the field of art”, “having an absence of meaning, both its creator and the piece lack value”, “this meaningless chaos can be done by anyone, even a child”. The list of statements can be infinite. Each of these statements corresponds to a discussion that can lead to deep and inexhaustible paths. The last word on a problem has never been written. This very idea is the watchword that inspires motivation in the spirit of the collage artist. He knows well, intuits, or assumes that different outputs, solutions, or conformations can be generated with the same materials.
But, looking at the initial problem, what is the meaning of a collage? Does collage have a meaning, does it pursue one? Is collage only one meaning or can it contain different meanings? The questions can also be endless. Thinking about this refers to the question that Diderot asked about beauty “Do I like it because it is beautiful or is it beautiful because I like it?”. In this question, something appears and something hides. If the person affirms that it is beautiful because he likes it, then he would be limiting the concept and the beauty itself to his taste. Consequently, only what he likes is beautiful. Beauty would be subject to his predilection. Instead, if the answer is that he likes it because it is beautiful, the person would be considering the assumption of beauty prior to his taste, making him a taster of the essence of beauty. In this case, the beauty is locatable and it would be enough to apply a series of tests to the entities to recognize whether or not the beauty is there. Something similar happens between collage and meaning. “Do I give meaning to collage or does collage give me meaning?”
If the collage has a meaning and if it is found before its realization, then the process of realization, the creative act, becomes a means for the meaning to assume a form. In the other scenario, when the meaning of the collage emerges after its completion, the creative act becomes a way for the form to provide meaning. In both cases, we witnessed a kind of persecution. It seems as if A is chasing B. A kind of follow-up or subsequence. Surely you remember Sullivan’s axiom that gave so much fruit to design pragmatism: form follows function. Could it be that in the case of a collage, the form follows the meaning or the meaning follows the form?
It is clear that many collage artists have some clarity before making a piece. They may have very specific materials or intuitions to develop their creations. For their part, there are other artists who leave the aforementioned elements to chance. With some regularity, those who belong to the first group are taken as a style equivalence. The repeated use of themes or materials seems to make an identifiable trait of uniqueness. In the second case, by taking possibility as a principle, the unique feature is less traceable. Kurt Schwitters, like many artists of his time, consented to the dissolution of authorship as a way to contest the mythical identification of the artist.
However, it is possible to concede that in both cases there is a style. It’s probably more visible or identifiable in one than the other, but it’s definitely there. Just as in both cases, we can verify the existence of the style, in both cases the meaning is manifested. The tendency to think of meaning as equivalent to order restricts the possibility of discovering a multiplicity of meanings and other forms of order. Both, order and meaning are concepts that carry dense histories. Just as order resembles a pre-established scale of value, meaning can be considered an expression of virtue.
But by putting the meaning under the axiology of the pre-established order, we can reveal that, just as the order may not generate value, the meaning may not promote virtue. This may be because the meaning is outside the field of order. Put like this, meaning escapes order. Meaning cannot be apprehended by order, just as it cannot be captured by a single form. That was a conclusion reached gradually by some artists at the dawn of modernity. And that is still the explosive seed of many current debates about art. Under this perspective, the meaning would be more similar to a fluid than to a solid entity. Sense follows flux. If we wanted to continue twisting the line of the axiom. Being fluid, meaning escapes, slips, strains, and filters. It is always “beyond”. It is like the horizon that always recedes with each step taken in an attempt to reach it. In the case of collage, meaning is diluted, it is a constant fluid. It is probable that the collage artist takes the search for meaning as a catalyst for the form, always recognizing that new meaning can correspond to each variation. In this creation, meaning and form are constantly in tension. For this reason, collage can be infinite and go through a metamorphosis comparable to fluid. Just as the form can remain in suspense, the meaning can also remain suspended. The meaning of the collage is in suspense. The collage is a meaning suspended, frozen, always on the verge of change, always looming a possibility. Perhaps when we are in front of a collage, more than a given meaning, we observe suspense. That is what prompts us to think and consequently to speak.