Collaborative Cutting

It just goes to show you that your unconscious mind works far better than your conscious mind ... in the realm of creativity at least.

Recently my sister Jen hosted an evening of artistic expression. I was invited to her home along with a few friends to make collages. Her roommate had rescued 100s of magazines from the trash at her place of work, and they were now occupying most of the storage space at their house. Time to put them to good use.

Upon arriving we all had snacks, chatted a bit and stole surreptitious glances at the stacks of magazines on the floor. After gorging myself on enough peanut butter cups to tide me over for the night (it's none too easy to eat chocolate with paste on your fingers), I set out to conquer the ever looming pile of periodicals.

As I said, there were 100s of magazines: everything from Vogue to Architectural Digest, Spy to Bon Appetite, Travel & Leisure to W. We were lost among them when our hostess came up for air and suggested we start in on five different collaborative effort collages. Each one of us started a collage and then passed it on to the next woman. We passed these collaborative collages around while we continued to look through the magazines. We each worked at our own pace. Often we'd find ourselves engrossed in an article only to be snapped back to reality by the rapid cutting and pasting of the women next to us.

I had come with a rough idea. Inspired by the ad campaign for "Being John Malkovich," I envisioned an old-fashioned map of the world with clippings of black and white Victorian corsets and frilly hats and gloves next to a color copy of Henri Rousseau's early piece, "Child on Rocks," which depicts an enormous boy sitting on a mountain top done in a child-like manner. I hadn't fleshed it out entirely but I imagined a couple misplaced words here and there and a sparse treatment of the collage as a whole. I had sort of prepared. I was armed with several pages of Victorian clip art and a reduced copy of Rousseau's work. I didn't quite have the motivation to get an old fashioned map with Peptobismal pink countries and muted blue oceans but I hoped to find one among the magazines.

I was convinced my collage idea would rock, but of course I couldn't find any satisfying pictures of a map. I was getting discouraged. Meanwhile, I was finding fabulous clippings of beauty products: splashes of purple eye shadows, orange lipsticks, a gloriously smoky kohl outlined eye. Curiously, I was attracted to images that coupled makeup and insects or reptiles. I found pictures of a bee-sting pout with a real bee perched on the puckered orange lips, a triumphant ant standing atop a red fingernail mountain, and a coral snake slithering along porcelain skin. I cut these images out without thinking about them. I liked them and I didn't question why. When it came to finding clippings for my original idea, I was forced to compromise and clip pictures of landscapes of all kinds. These landscapes didn't excite me, but they seemed the next best thing to my original idea.

I labored over how I was going to put my collage together. I bit the bullet and began, but right off the bat I stuck something on there that I thought was cool yet didn't fit my Malkovichian theme. The red rooftops of Italy and the Pacific seasides didn't mesh well with the rainforest greens. Frustrated, I threw my collage aside and started working on the collaborative efforts which had progressed nicely since I last saw them. As I received each in my turn, I pasted things on that I liked, only careful to not obscure anyone else's work. Most of the evening was spent in comfortable silence while we all diligently worked on our projects.

At the end of the evening we displayed our collages. First we looked at the collaborative ones; we were all duly impressed. They came out better then we expected. Whoever started the collage got to keep it. We talked about what we started our collages with and what we all added to them. We showed our individual collages and doted on the themes we did or didn't intend. Sleepy and creatively satisfied we cleaned up and drove home. I was happy I ditched Rousseau; "The best laid plans of mice and men ..."

--Kate Murphy