Sam Jacob: On Collage – Talk

Talk: Sam Jacob on Collage
Friday 6 February
18.00 – 20.00
Doors open at 18.00, talk begins 18.30
8 Smart’s Place, London, WC2B 5LW

Collage was used by the radical architects of the 1960s and 70s both as a tool for proposition and critique. Groups like Superstudio and Archigram cut up magazines and reassembled dislocated things and figures into drawings. In part, their ideas needed collage in order to work; print culture provided them with material, and collage enabled them to physically engage with the very substance of mass media. Choosing, cutting-up, and reassembling images allowed these architects, just as Pop Artists had shown, to work in dialogue with popular culture in variously groovy surrealist, or provocative ways.

For us, marinated in digital images, this notion of mass media might seem quaint. So too the laborious process of scouring magazines for the right image, and the scalpel and Cow Gum skills required. We swim in a world of images, most of them coming to us already out of context. With tools like Google Images and Photoshop, we can find things and process them instantly. We have AI images, which are, in some ways, a form of collage—all of visual history is sliced-up into pixel-sized pieces and reassembled in new forms. It’s both all too much and all too easy. – Sam Jacob

Drawing Matter’s public programme offers the public opportunities to experience our drawings collection, which is usually only open to researchers by appointment and for student/practice workshops. Events take the form of talks at the archive, workshops by practitioners and open weekends.

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