It wasn’t until the early twentieth century, when Georges Braque or Pablo Picasso started gluing paper onto the canvases of their geometrical paintings, to fight the ‘flatness [that] had not only invaded but was threatening to swamp the Cubist picture,’ as explained by the American art critic Clement Greenberg1. In doing so, they stumbled onto the new modernist art form of the collage. This technique comes from the French word, coller, to glue.
Hannah Höch, a German Dadaist, ran with this form. Her photomontages were a means to access the subconscious, political and absurd. She was hell-bent on dismantling the myth of the ‘new woman’ which was a term used to describe the newly-emerging feminist – educated and independent women of the mid-twentieth century. Through works like Das Schone Madchen/The Beautiful Girl (1919-1920), Hannah reconfigured and reframed photos from women’s magazines to question this new notion of the modern woman.
The collage allowed for the pushing together of fragmentary materials from different spatiotemporal situations to reveal something else. The collage, much like the daily central practice of the queer subject, is tasked with constructing new worlds and identities from the same materials as everybody else. The act of collaging resonates with the queer subject’s ability to recast violence, to rearrange the aggressive and to reflect the substance in style.
It is this possibility of something else to emerge that caught the magpie eyes of queer artists like David Wojnarowicz, who expanded, extended and exploited this space to tell different stories using the mainstream images that were utilised to critique the AIDS crisis of the 80s. In seeking to figure out this relationship between queerness and collage, this essay will speak of three queer Indian artists to understand their impetus and interest with making such works.