What art have I seen? I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies
Autograph: “From cut paper to generative AI, examining political dissent and erasure through the idea of collage.”
It’s all here, archives, erasures, combinations to create new realities, new patterns, new narratives. Lives are collages and displacement, colonial powers, empires, dictators, all create cuts – that much is obvious. Births, marriages, divorces, deaths are all acts that contribute.
Some of the works tilt to the political, some to the family, some are perhaps mostly concerned with aesthetics. What is true is that the visual exceeds what I can write.
What art have I seen? Peter Kennard
Archive of Dissent at Whitechapel. We agreed that some more of the context, of Greenham Common for instance, could have been good. Somehow everything being ‘the work’ misses the point of collage maybe? If collage is the recomposition of reality, should the exhibition be only the collages when they become historical?
What art have I seen? Collage
Collage exhibition at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
What art have I seen?
Schwitters in Britain at the Tate Britain.
Schwitters after Duchamp yesterday evoked a further set of relationships. Fascinating to see these two masters of the 20th Century, one sometimes derided and the other not well known. The Duchamp exhibition, well described here, is explicitly about influence. The Schwitters exhibition is a more traditional historical narrative shaped by geography and war. It has two contemporary responses Laure Prouvost and Adam Chodzko attached at the end. There are also interesting similarities in the exhibition design, though the Barbican is perhaps more compelling.
Peter McCaughey reminded me, Schwitters’ interest was achieving the smallest, shortest, gap between idea and realisation (“Merz art strives for immediate expression by shortening the path from intuition to visual manifestation of the artwork” Merz Painting, 1919 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Schwitters). What is the relationship between Schwitters and Latham? One second drawings?
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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