Collage in art and fabrication
collage-montage, 1912
Collage and montage in art
Let’s explore the idea of collage and montage in art, after which you’ll create a physical collage using 3D modeling. We’ll see how a collage approach to art is not necessarily limited to cutting and pasting paper. And we’ll discover how one artist in particular, Louise Nevelson, pioneered a collage approach to sculpture.
But the origin of this way of thinking first appears in the 2D world. Let’s turn the clock a half-century before Nevelson’s signature work appears.
Cubists and Dadaists
We’ve bumped into collage several times in our projects and our texts. To work on your sculpture, it will be useful to know a bit more about its place in Twentieth Century art. Critics widely regard Synthetic Cubism as the first flowering of this methodology. While Pablo Picasso gets the credit for the invention of collage with his Still Life with Chair-caning, a particular driving force behind it was Georges Braque. He invented a kind of collage known as papier collé in 1912.
The next step was the reactionary photomontage work of Dada. Artists such as Hannah Höch and her partner Raoul Hausmann refused to play the role of artist by playing with refuse. Read a rich and brief history of Dada photomontage at the website Cut and Paste (captured at the Wayback Machine). Read the introductory text about the 1920s, and look at the four artists listed there: Hanna and Raoul, as well as John Heartfield and Kurt Schwitters. Altogether, it’s a less than 10-minute read.
But this is all paper: what does collage have to do with 3D work? Collage has more to do with a particular method and attitude toward material and its origins in “found stuff” than a dimensional expression. Does it matter whether that “found stuff” is paper or wood? Let’s place that question in the context of sculptural methods.
Sculptural methods
Recall several means of making in sculptural praxis from earlier readings. Let’s revisit them with samples you’ve seen to refresh your memory:
- Additive | Exemplified by building up a mass like clay, but also typified by the process of 3D printing.
- Subtractive | Typical of carving, or subtracting, material from a block of stone or wood, but also demonstrated in CNC milling and routing (which is the tool for our project!).
- Assembly | Gluing, nailing, or otherwise fastening discrete objects together, it is in the Assembly process that we see a collage sensibility emerge in sculpture. This can be done conceptually in 3D modeling.
- Substitution | Substituting one material (say, the clay from above) with a more durable one (say, bronze metal) is one strategy found in mold-making. But the transformation of material states can also imply an expression of abstraction—simplifying a form into the essence of its mass by unifying its material.
The project we’re exploring now touches in ways both direct and indirect on all four of these methodological classes, so let’s explore how…
This work combines digital fabrication with traditional stone carving and is related to the way we’ll work on our CNC router.
Sculptural modes in our project
We will be generating individual objects in our work by modeling additively. In 3D modeling, we’ll add mass to a form by building up from a simple shape. In our first exercise, using a 2D sketch as a parametric basis, we’ll generate form through acts of extrusion, rotation, sweeping a sketch along a path, and lofting. These operations create an additive mass at the same time they imply motion.
We will be fabricating subtractively, using the CNC router to carve out a block of material.
We will take the individual objects modeled above and assemble them into a layered, mass-and-void composition. This will be inspired by the work of Louise Nevelson. Her collage sensibility in sculpture will be introduced below.
Finally, the object we will fabricate is a mold used to substitute a physical 3D object from a digital 3D model. Time constraints may not permit us to perform an actual casting during the studio. However, we’ll discuss the process for using the mold to cast your form in plaster or resin.
Low and high relief
In Chapter 5 of parallelUniverses, we were introduced to a volumetric expression known as relief work. Recall, using samples from that chapter, the distinction between bas relief (or low relief)high relief.
Nicholson’s more restrained work feels like a painting, but shadows belie the changes of plane activating the composition spatially. Longo’s work seems to want to burst out of the wall into full, freestanding form. However, it is still intended to be seen from a privileged point of view in the manner of a painting. If you could walk behind it (and you can’t as it’s wall-mounted), all you would see is a blank plane that contributes nothing to the active frontal composition — which, incidentally, oozes a strong sense of implied motion.
Let’s go a bit deeper into this kind of work by exploring an artist who combines Nicholson’s sense of abstraction with Longo’s sense of active motion.
Louise Nevelson
Read Nevelson’s biography at The Art Story.
Louise Nevelson is the artistic patron saint for this project. An immigrant from Russia whose family fled religious persecution, she made enduring contributions to American culture as an artist whose work won the accolades of critics. She did this as she broke down barriers to women in the “boys’ club” of art in mid-twentieth-century New York. She inspired generations of women artists from Eva Hesse to Rachel Whiteread with her ability to abstract form at a monumental scale using humble materials.
Nevelson was a pack rat. She collected old wood and architectural elements from demolished buildings, recycling them by collaging finials, medallions, scraps, and fragments of carvings into boxes. She would then unify them by abstracting them into a uniform color and finishing through paint. This was usually black as we see in Luminous Zag. But sometimes she’d break out the white — or even gold, as seen in Royal Tide. She’s possibly evoking the spiritual majesty of a particular historical relief work: Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise on the Baptistery in Florence, Italy.
Translating Nevelson’s forms to implied motion modeling operations
When you look closely at one of the “cells” of a Nevelson work, you begin to see the turned wood objects that recall the Revolve function in Fusion 360, or the end stock of round wood cylinders that might invoke an Extrusion. You might see snaking, linear wood detail that might suggest the Sweep of a plane along a curving path. Or you may encounter a random, blobby shape that could only be reproduced through a Loft. We’ll learn about these in one of our exercises.
But, of course, while we see plenty of evidence of Assembly in this high-relief work, how about Substitution through casting? Not so much. So, although Nevelson is the inspiration for our work, we have to go through a process of translating her formal language into one that can support the development of a mold that will respect the inherent limitations of casting. To do this, we’ll learn in a second exercise how to avoid the problems that might plague a mold taken right off of a cell in one of Nevelson’s installations.