THE FUTURE IS JUNK - paul burgess

7. Less 2/ Less 7, Sergei Sviatchenko, 2009
8. Romance, Linder Sterling, The secret Public fanzine 1978 / with Jon Savage
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The Future is Junk
pieces and stare at the pieces,” he said. “At one point they begin
shouting to other pieces in my house, cut up from another adventure.
I put them together, for better or worse. Shotgun marriage.”
He describes the process as “spelling with scissors”. Within the recent
resurgence of collage and the re-using of found imagery does
the coveted act of collecting have the same resonance? Does the
digital availability of every kind of image mean collecting no longer
has the same romance. Rose argues, “I don't ‘collect’ as much as
‘I find’. The world washes up millions of images and objects and I
simply pick them up like shells on a beach. I don't look for the perfect
image at all but for images that, once combined with my ideas,
provide a visual cocktail that surprises me. I always say that what
I make in collage (or drawing or painting) is really my interest in
seeing what it could look like, what it could possible mean.”
And like many collagists he is not just a collector, but an archivist
of urban detritus. The collecting is a creative act. As a collagist
he sees a small bit of blue-and-white-striped paper from a
candy bag tossed on the ground and savaged by rain and mud,
completely differently to the average citizen. “It carries with it a
hundred different possibilities, I transform these things,” he says.
“I am interested in line and colour and texture and potential – and
that's the mysterious part. I'll pick it up and put it in my pocket
and perhaps forget about it for months. So I don't collect as much
as find (and this extends to old magazines, books, pieces of wood,
laundry tickets, paper bills, plastic bits, old advertising or things
printed on cardboard. That said, I do have an enormous trove of
this material. I don't know what young artists collect, but I surmise
that many of them collect things on the internet, print them or put
them in folders for some later digital manipulation. I don't do this.
I'm interested in paper, printing, parts of design, things lost and
discarded, decayed and unwanted. A friend once saw a box of things
I'd assembled for later use and he said, ‘everyone should have a box
like that’.”
The Art of Hoarding
Every collage artist collects in some way. You are only as good
as your ‘box of things’, your archive, your ephemera. Peter Quinnell,
who has been working with collage and 3D assemblage for
over 25 years, is an avid hoarder of imagery from the 1960s, 1970s
and 1980s. Well known around the car boot sales of Hastings, Quinnell
has a vast collection of images and objects at his disposal. Do
artists like Quinnell have the psychology of the collector? “It’s not
about completing the set”, he argues, “it’s more about having the
raw material to work with, to create the perfect picture. It could
also be about the fear that one day this material may run out, so
I better hoard it now, and particularly for commercial work, as I
am trying to use images that are out of copyright. I have always
collected stuff, but mainly not in specific categories, just all sorts
of detritus that attracts me. The use of the real objects in my
work is an excuse for the collecting. It's probably some sort of
mental illness.”
Sergei Sviatchenko, born in the Ukraine in 1952, but now based
in Denmark, is the master of the ‘less is more’ collage approach. “I
am a collector,” says Sviatchenko. “It is not like I am looking for the
perfect image; it is more like I am afraid I will not find it when I
will need it, because I know I must have it somewhere, that is why
I collect. I always liked the simplicity of making collage, for me it
reflects the layering of life, when we meet people, people of different
ages and get influenced by them, read different books and listen
to classical or modern music, have happy and tragic moments. The
inspiration is my personal photo archive and a desire to create different
structures out of the known image. I cannot say I relate to
what is happening with collage today, because I have worked with
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