Jim Jarmusch’s Collages Are Ready for Their Close-Up - The New York Times

For the past 20 years he's also been quietly producing collages like these, notecard-size pieces of delicately layered newsprint on cardstock that echo a similar worldview, scrambling imagery to create alternatingly deadpan and revelatory compositions. Jarmusch's collages are manipulations of something originally presented as fact - a détournement of photojournalism serrated and spliced into surrealist scenes that collapse time, or illustrate some psychic fantasy. As Joseph Cornell wrote, "Collage = reality."

"The interesting thing about them is they reveal to me that my process of creating things is very similar, whether I'm writing a script or shooting a film or making a piece of music or writing a poem or making a collage," Jarmusch said. Whereas a film shoot necessitates sophisticated and heavy equipment, not to mention the cooperation of many people, the collages require only solitude and a copy of the paper, a movable feast of broadsheet.

Jarmusch's collages fit within a rich art history, which joins with the art world tradition of appropriation, as sacred as it is misunderstood, from Kurt Schwitters, who assembled delirious assemblages from trash, to Hannah Hoch's and Man Ray's Dadaist compositions, to Ad Reinhardt's clattering, modernist "Newsprint Collage."

"Max Ernst, Picasso and Braque, particularly, bringing other textures into their work, which carries through to one of my favorite artists of all time, Jasper Johns," Jarmusch said. As local newspapers around the country cease operations or migrate to digital-only formats, Jarmusch's collages become a document of a rapidly evaporating medium. "There's something soothing for me in handling the paper, I don't know how to explain it. Digital is too cold for me. I love it for many things, my last films have been shot with digital cameras and I've been editing on digital machines since 1996. I'm not a total Luddite."

Jarmusch is interested in the pure visual collision of collage, but his source material inevitably troubles their innocence.



source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/arts/design/jim-jarmusch-collages.html

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