THE FUTURE IS JUNK - paul burgess

11. The Joyful Bewilderment, Nick White, 2008
12. Person Pitch: Panda Bear, Agnes Montgomery, 2007. Courtesy of Paw Tracks.
13. The End (1), Matthew Rose, 2008
it for so long time, since the late 70s. But I do realise it is part of
the mainstream now, everyone is armed with scissors. Sometimes I
want to disarm them.”
Junk Modelling
Martin O’Neill has been working as an illustrator and collage
artist since 1995 and in that time has amassed a vast archive of
found images, text and ephemera. He catalogues his collection in
his studio by using a labeling system to house his graphic archive.
His collection includes secondhand books, albums and scrapbooks,
found type, magazines and encyclopedias, found paper, record
sleeves, all kept lovingly in filing cabinets, boxes, shelving units
and pigeon holes. If the digital gurus of the mid 1990s were to be
believed, O’Neill’s distinctly analogue methodology should now be
a thing of the past. However, he is as busy as ever. A resurgence in
the ‘hand-made’ aesthetic allows artists such as O’Neill to use the
computer in their work (mainly exploiting the scanner and printer)
in the same way previous generations exploited the photocopier,
PMT camera or fax machine. The mantra of the smart collagist is
“the computer is only a tool, use it. Don’t let it use you.” The danger
is, that in the race to dig up the next historically overlooked image
to cut, paste, mix, fuse, alter and rework, the meaning of the original
image is lost. Or the meaning was never understood in the first
place. So while the power of Google Images may appear to provide
an almost limitless selection of images, it rarely yields anything of
quality. O’Neill describes his working process as “making connections
between the elements I use, it’s like being a one-man band
with lots of instruments, but no sheet music.”
But as much as collage is about interpretation as making connections,
it is also about interpretation as conflict. British artist John
Stezaker has been collecting found images for decades, which he
then collages in subtle ways to create challenging images. Stezarker
had his first solo show in 1970, and has always been an outsider,
but the art world has shown a recent surge of interest in his work.
Stezaker is interested in the conflict and encounter in the juxtaposition
of two images, and the third-meaning that emerges. Stezarker
explains, “I had decided that I did not want to add to the world
of images but only to intervene in what was already there.” He
often carves away at and reduces the photographs he works with
to give an un-nerving edge to formerly quaint portraits of movie
stars from the 1940s and 1950s. The art critic Elizabeth Manchester
wrote, “the stills from those films tap deeply into a collective nostalgia
that contributes significantly to the expressive, even expressionistic
register of the work. For Stezaker this nostalgia derives
from childhood memories of being outside of the cinema, looking in
towards a world he could not, because of his age, gain access.” He
was looking in on filmic scenes that would come to shape his future
as an artist. John Stezaker’s collage work feels wistful for a certain
lost time in the past, his use of Ladybird book illustrations (The
series Flash 2007) and film stills from the 1960’s enforce this. The
images are then dissected in a violent manner to shake us from our
cosy, nostalgic dreams.
Compositions of Time
For the last twenty years or so the use of the photocopy machine,
Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and After Effects has pushed collage
into the mainstream through print, magazines, video and animation.
Going back to 1995, Kyle Cooper’s celebrated title sequence
for David Fincher's Se7en again influenced a whole host of designers
and collage artists and the area of the moving image, film and
TV is now ripe for reworking by collage Artists. The recent title
sequence for True Blood, designed by Alan Ball at Digital Kitchen
has over 65 shots comprised of original documentary, studio, table-
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The Future is Junk
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