Etymology Influences IT Things Non-IT Things Main

C is for Collage, M is for Multi-Media

Six years in undergraduate school was a good long time for taking classes in all kinds of things that interested me. The Art School, where I spent my last three years, was an exceptionally vibrant place in the early eighties. I was fortunate to be working among a lot of people with interesting ideas who were exploring film, performance, found-object assemblage, and site-specific installation with both exceptional and disastrous results. Memorable moments included Patrik Keim's time clock performance piece/installation, in which he occupied a Kafka-esque assemblage of newspapers and bureaucratic references, punching a time clock and shaving his head, and Jim Herbert's film class, which first introduced many of us to non-narrative film-making.

The traditional approach to image-making in art in Western culture has been as an asynchronous activity -- the image-maker makes the image and the viewer can look at it at any time. Through these experiences, I began to understand art as something that could occur in synchronous time, in which an important element of the work was its transience -- for example, a performance piece or sitework. Art could also happen asynchronously but with continuity -- for example, a mail art piece in which collages were progressively forwarded for artistic additions.

Temporality and the use of mixed-media gave me an understanding of art as a process in which ideas were explored in different ways, and meaning accrued through serial repetition. The group experience was also an important aspect of the experience, as we often shared and expanded on ideas and made collaborative works.

It is interesting to remember that at this time, the primary mode of producing a college paper was by going to the library, combing through the Reader's Guide to Periodicals books in the reference area, going through the card catalog, searching the stacks, writing notecards or making photocopies (we did have Xerox machines!), and typing up the results -- if you were lucky, you had an electric typewriter!.