”When do we assemble all the cut up pieces, and how?” This was surely a question au courant a hundred years ago, post WW1. Civilization uprooted by mechanical warfare, human bodies torn to shreds by screeching heavy metal. Good-hearted artists mirroring the chaos and debris by cutting orderly source material and re-assembling the pieces in random and weirdly estheticized ways. Inevitable therapies!
This process of spontaneous (potential) healing evolved through collage, photo montage, neo cut-ups, video and music sampling etc. It’s a healthy process that will never end. As long as order will become inert, there will be chaotic remedies sprouting literally like ”flowers of evil” (for good).
I wonder where the John Heartfields and Hannah Höchs are today? Or even the Gysins, Burroughses and Ballards? There is surely more fodder than ever to ritually scrutinize? Or perhaps the simulacrum plague fever induced by AI has made everyone complacent and lazy? Prompting ”write a text in the style of a William Burroughs cut-up” or ”create an image in the style of John Heartfield” just isn’t the same thing as actually doing the work, is it? ”Where has all the magic gone?”
I guess the key element is not so much a technique or an esthetic but a deliberate attempt at subversion. Taking elements and contexts of meaning one doesn’t perhaps full agree with, and dismantling the totality into malleable pieces – totally at one’s own command. Old meaning becomes new meaning in splendid subversion; a homeopathic overdose within the system desperately trying to get by. But it’s certainly a compassionate subversion, as the overall health of the system cannot but be the most important thing. And the healthiest system or structure is one that not only allows but actually encourages the satirical counterforce.
On this note I would like to recommend the book Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art – The Cut In Creation by my lovely wife Vanessa Sinclair. It’s a book that takes you through the history of the cut within art history, and ties it in to/with the psychoanalytic process that is more or less inevitable at all times.
Cutting up source material is a form of psychic hygiene that borders on therapy. What comes out of the random reassembly of the cut-ups or images in turn could carry oracular potential. Hocus Pocus? Yes, certainly, and of the very finest kind.
The video in this post is Vanessa talking about her Scansion book. If you want to have your own copy if the book, please go here.
Vanessa’s Rendering Unconscious Center for Psychoanalysis can be found here.
Vanessa’s award-winning podcast Rendering Unconscious can be found here.
