Flat files in which collage-makers store the personal materials collected in their own boxes for exploration in pre-collage interviews, re-photographing, and eventual inclusion in their collages. The top of the flat file provides a convenient place for the scanning book. (Roll over image.)
“We know more than we can use. Look at all this stuff I’ve got in my head: rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc man and Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms.”
—Susan Sontag
I, etcetera, 1979
“A
good deal of my own junk and rubbish — and I discover that this is
true for other people as well — falls under the general heading of
mementos or souvenirs: college term papers, postcards, brochures and leaflets
from trips, old conference programs, photographs and clippings, old letters…
There is, at least, a feeling that if we throw out this junk we are being
disrespectful to the past it memorializes … for what constitutes
the past as notable and significant are the markers that mark it as the
original.”
—Jonathan Culler
“Rubbish Theory,” 1988
The materiality of the method — all of its requirements for space, equipment and supplies — exists to give the collage-maker access to the collective and private image-repertoire, and to support him or her during the exposure of configurations assembled from this repertoire to the possibility of structural transformation.