Collage And Violence: Make Art As a Massive Challenge

Wild Think, You Make My Heart Sink

Here I take a stab at a political collage. We are too violent and the US has too many guns. Guns make a random decent day into a specific horrific one.

They wake up innocent on the day they shoot someone or themselves. They head out of their houses with pistols and with assault rifles, they set out still innocent, some even thinking innocent thoughts, they move through the day with murder heavy on their person, they carry, they set out from their mother’s, from their own houses, they set out armed in a furious world, in a gentle world, and the thing about guns is that they are fast, faster than shouted warnings, faster than second thought.

How do you like that red? My in-laws gave me a bag of thrift store art supplies. A few white canvas bags full of brushes and little bottles. They turned out to be India ink in lots of brilliant colors. The yellow especially believes in itself. Pow! Yellow. I’ve fallen into using these inks. Down, down, down. Two recent posts had Alice in Wonderland pictures and they were mostly made with the India ink. I’ve also used it for a whitewater river.

The most interesting thing about this ink is that it is waterproof. Once it dries, it sort of hardens — you can paint over it and it won’t budge.

Artists have little bottles and bundles everywhere, on tables, counters, in scatters or rows, each saying paint me, knead me, draw me, shape me, and the artist gets bigger and smaller, accordion-ly, like Alice. My little wax or clay people make me big. My art-pleading against violence makes me infinitesimal.

If you live long enough, life can be educational.

They wake up innocent. Often, they don’t mean for it to happen. They are free, self-possessed, and walking on starlight, but things go wrong. They were innocent, their hearts were clear, they dreamed of flying; that’s not what they dream about anymore. Now they have ghosts in the corner of their eyes, all the time; and the nightmares fit the crimes.

Live long enough and you notice the constant perverse complexity of the human animal at the end of its tether: the antisemite leader is part Jewish, the shooter of a gay club is not simply a hater but also gay, the would be assassin of a Republican turns out to be Republican, the government building bomber turns out not to hate America, but instead believes himself more American than we are.

When the pandemic hit I was already in a collage phase and suddenly I had a lot of time, and it became my passion for a while. I had been making boxes, inspired by Joseph Cornell’s boxes, and the constraints of a NYC apartment made me take the concept flat.

The thing about collage is that you can either create a picture based on what your eye likes, or you can try to do that while also saying something. I noticed that I was stuck for the longest time doing only the first of these. I just wanted to make things hit my eye a certain way. Here’s one that almost says something — about peace and war.

When I noticed that most of my collages didn’t, I tried to get them to say something, but mostly, I couldn’t. Here’s an example of what I had in mind made by the great poet and sometimes artist Sylvia Plath.

President Eisenhower is the background of the whole piece, and on his head is a war plane, and on his lapel the bolded word SLEEP. The messages that circle his image speak to gender roles and luxury and they seem, in this context, to be referring to the different ways we are convinced to SLEEP up and take it.

So with my new inks, I’ve made the collage up top about violence and America, history and guns. The word indelible comes to mind for both ink and murder.

They wake up innocent. Leaving, they lock the door clueless that it’s not the home that needs protection. They go on errands, pick up their last check, they drive on the freeway, go to a party. Before they get through they will make a hair trigger error in judgement and ruin their own long short lives and end the long short lives of others. Bang, bang. Time stops. Deafened and surprised.

The bottles are so old that the droppers in the tops are mostly dried out, crunchy, so I have to pour it. The ink separates but with a shake seems fine. The ink has been liquid for a long time. Now the ink dries on my page and it’s dry forever. As in the spilled blood of the ritual lamb. As in Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (690).

The moving finger writes and having writ

moves on [and neither] all thy piety nor wit

could lure it back to cancel half a line,

nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

Khayyam and his poem date to the 11th century and FitzGerald’s loose translation to 1859. You and I don’t know each other very well but we both date from right now which is a lot. Why not try a collage about gun violence? A minor impossible feat? Or at least, let’s us DON’T SLEEP.

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love,

Jennifer